March of the Living

March of the Living. Another make your choices while travelling game while managing resources. Seen worse seen better, how does it start? Zombie apocalypse as usual, buddy. First you travel by a car (off screen) then you just walk. I do believe that it’s against human rights to force an American walk longer than it needs for him to reach his car. Sorry that’s a joke that been going around internet for some time. 

 Anyway, we have sets of characters each with their own quest to do. But only one unlocked from the start, dude name Greg (Old man Greg). He… probably wasn’t in his right mind and decided during zombie apocalypse to check on his ex-wife and his son. What’s his plan? Same as Kenny had in Walking Dead get on a boat and swim away. But well… his wife… didn’t make it. BUT! He found out from a note that his wife new boyfriend took his son Tom to his cabin somewhere in the wood. Not sure how it ends I died before trying to help some survivors group to fight off a group of bandits. It’ll take a while to get used to the gameplay and all of its shenanigans. 

Speaking of gameplay let’s talk how it all goes. First of all our dude have some skills on him. Greg is good with firearms (Americans of course) but his best gun skill is pistols. We also have inventory, small around 10 items. Thankfully rations and bullets do not take space.Then we have Hit Points bar, Fatigue bar and Hunger bar. We lose our health when we get hit by a zombie, or a bandit, or from a bad choice during an event and restore by using medicaments. Fatigue and hunger goes down as we travel and we need to rest and eat to restore it. Take a note during a rain fatigue goes down faster.  To satisfy our hunger me must make a stop and manually order our dude to eat. Same with resting, weird thing is our dude we lie down right in the middle of road. Dude… can you like take couple of steps off the road? What if a car runs you over? Well whatever who am I to teach him where to sleep, maybe he doesn’t mind getting send to heaven in his sleep. 

Next on the list are battles. If you look to the upper side of the UI you’ll see the bar named “Growls”. It indicates how close zombies to you are. So when it fills you have an encounter. Took me a while to figure out how battle works. First! Do not forget to equip your weapon (poor alkie Barry). Second! You can look down and see the percentage chance to hit your target in relation to how far you are way from it. You can order you survivor to move to another place by clicking the destination with lmb. You can switch weapon with “w” button. You can also chose how are you going to attack, or to be precise where to shot. Don’t forget to manually reload your weapon by clicking “reload” icon under a character’s portrait. Or slice/bonk your target or shove it if you use melee weapon. If you see a red crosshair on your survivor it means you’re about to be attacked. So try to move your dude away. And of course during a battle you can pause to order your team around. 

Next on the list is traveling. You click on a “map” option in the upper right corner of your screen. This will bring the map screen, there are more than one page of maps. Than you pick a direction in which you are going to move. There are several markings on your map. Your initial quest marked with a purple cross-hair. Yellow square is for your next map destination. Lastly there is a building icon. That is how towns are marked on your map. In a town you can scavenge several locations. Police stations, convenience store, drug store, hospital etc. You can pick either 20, 40 or 60 minutes, that how long you going to rummage around. The longer you search the more chances that zombie will caught you.  

Finally the events. During your travel parts and when you reach your initial destination event will occur. Could be anything from a deer hunter willing to trade his rations for a couple of bullets to band of 1920 looking gangsters shaking down people for antique collection of bobble heads. Sometime there will be skill checks or items checks, you know the drill. 

Final opinion. It is okay travelling game, though I’d rather had a bit different battle system. This one is kinda awkward and will require extra time to get used to especially gun fights. If you wanna to good travelling game during zombie apocalypse play “Death Road To Canada” instead it is way better than this game. You can try this game if you already played Organ Trail and DRtC.