Thursday, 22 March 2012

Game Review: Rebuild

 

Time To Rebuild

During my long search for good turn based strategy games, I luckily came across Rebuild, on Kongregate. I wasn't so popular back then, maybe a year or so ago, but now is one of the most popular games in the Strategy section of the website, and on many other sites as well. This game isn't too hard to play, and doesn't require you to be a full time strategy gamer to win. The only fault that I find in this game is that when you have reached a certain point in the game where you have tons of buildings and people, it gets somewhat boring because you are guaranteed to win, even if you don't have half the map cleared. But don't go getting the idea that the game is just a walk in the park, it will take some time before you can secure a victory, and if you play on one of the more difficult modes, it'll be hell and will punish you if you are lazy and put no thoughts behind plans.

The storyline in Rebuild is that the world is taken over by Zeds (zombies) and you are isolated to a part of your city with a few people that you start with. The goal of the game is to first, get people to join you, scavenge for food, and kill zombies to reclaim infested areas. There are specialists that have abilities, but I'll get into that a little later, for now I'll tell you what you have to do to win.


Your Goal

As I've said, the goal of this game is to kill all the Zeds, but there are many ways to do so in this game. Most ways don't require you to eliminate all of the zombies. You could build a city by first securing the City Hall, then using five Leaders to form an official city, and you win. You can also research a cure to the Zed infection with Scientists, or destroy the Zombie portal. Eliminating and reclaiming all the map is another way of winning, and get you more points for it as well. When you win one way, you can continue on in your game to discover other ways of winning, thus giving you more points. I'm not entirely sure I have achieved all the different ways to win yet, but you can try the game out for yourself.


Specialists

So as I've said I would explain, here are the different types of specialists and their abilities.

Leader
1. Leaders, these are very important, in fact you are a Leader, when you start the game, you will get to choose your gender and name, and also the name of your city. Starting the game, you are the only Leader, but there are two different ways to get more, I'll explain the first one. When you are in game, you can see the Zed infested blocks next to your territory, if you click it, you can see if there are any survivors there, if there are, you can send people to recruit them. Recruiting with any citizens other than Leaders may result in a failure, but if you send a Leader along a recruiting mission, you will always have a successes. Whenever you recruit citizens, their occupation will be random, so it depends on luck whether you get the Specialist that you want.

Soldier
2. The second type of Specialists are Soldiers. Soldiers are very important, since they are the ones that kill the Zeds. Whenever you send any other type of Specialist, or even a citizen with no skill, they have a chance of maiming themselves, or get themselves killed, when you send Soldiers along, you can reduce the chances of death. You can see the chances for getting a loss during a mission when you are sending the citizens. There will be a red % that tells you what the chances of casualty are, so you should always check and see if you want to take chances or not. Soldiers are also very capable of defending your city against Zombie invasions, but I'll get to that later.

Scavenger
3. Scavengers are very useful in early game, but you probably won't need them as much when you begin monopolizing the map. Normally, when you scavenge a tile, you can only get a little bit of food at a time, but if you send a scavenger, then you can collect much more, but later on, you will have enough food producing tiles that food won't be a problem to you. It's the early game that requires you to do a lot of scavenging.

4. The fourth type are Builders, they speed up production when changing unusable tiles into usable ones, and also speed up the claiming of a territory. Builders are somewhat useful late game, since they help with the expansion of your city.

Builder
You can change the following buildings
Rubble---Park---Parking Lot---Farm---Suburbs
Motel---Apartment---School
8-12 Mart---McNoodles---Warehouse---Church---Hospital
XXOR Gas---Laboratory---Bar
Graveyard
Big Farm

Red = Unusable
Black = Usable


Scientist
5. Now last but not least are the Scientists. To win the game with scientists only requires time and a Laboratory. You have to study all of the pre-requisite researches and then you can research the cure for Zeds. The pre-requisites also help you in other modes of winning by increasing effectiveness of soldiers, or productivity of farms. They can also help prevent death and some researched can increase the effectiveness of hospitals, which means fewer deaths.


Winning will require you to use these specialists to help your city thrive and kill the Zed. I've mentioned that there are two ways to getting Leaders. As said, you can get a leader if you are lucky enough to recruit one, but the other way is far better and requires no luck. I will explain how in the "Buildings" part of this review. Which is the next paragraph, so enjoy.


Useful Buildings/Tiles

1. Police Station: is one of the first buildings you get. In the police station, or any other type of defensive structure, you may assign citizens to defend the city from random attacks and Zombie Hordes (more detail later). In the police station, you may check the defensive strength of your city and you can add more people on guard duty to increase your strength. You may also check the likely-hood of a Zombie attack killing one of your citizens or taking a building from you.

Farm
2. Farm: These buildings produce food for your population. You start off with one farm, and it won't produce enough for your people, so you will have to either scavenge, or reclaim other farms for food to sustain your population.

Suburbs
3. Suburbs: provides living space for citizens, having more of these lets you recruit more survivors. However, the more survivors you have, the more food you will need each turn to sustain them. So think wisely when making the choice of recruiting. You start off with two of these.
4. Apartment: This building provides more living space than suburbs, if you don't need more space, you can always construct a School out of this building and vice-versa.

School
5. School: Having a school allows you to educate a survivor regardless of whether they are a specialist or not, so that they become a specialist of your choice. It takes 3 turns to educate your survivors, and you may educate up to 3 survivors in one school. Having multiple schools may be useful if you want to change a citizen's profession, but if you don't you can always build an Apartment out of this.

6. Church: allows you to throw parties, increasing your happiness by 10% if you employ a regular citizen, and 15% if you employ a Leader, you may also employ 2 Leaders to make it a 20% boost. This costs 50 food, so you may not want to do this if you are starving your city.

Hospital
7. Hospital: have chances to save lives, where otherwise they may die from a disease or Zombie wound. Always having at least one is very useful, since it can save many lives over the course of an unpredictable game.

8. Laboratory: Let's you employ Scientists to research important technologies, and is provides a means of winning the game. Each Scientist you employ speeds up research time by 1 day. 

Technologies and Descriptions:

     Research Binoculars
Help spot more living survivors while scouting new areas. 

     Research Radio
Hopefully people will hear our signal and come to join us. 
- Requires: Binoculars 

     Research Electricity
Make everyone happier with grid power for the whole fort. 
- Requires: Binoculars, Radio 

     Research Preservation
Get more food from scavenging and stop it from going bad. 

     Research Pesticides
Put a stop to bugs and disease that cause crops to fail.
- Requires: Preservation 

     Research Fertilizer
Farms will produce extra food.
- Requires: Preservation, Pesticides 

     Research Zombie Vitals
Knowing where to aim makes killing zombies easier. 

     Research Stealth
Makes it safer to scout and scavenge far away.
 - Requires: Zombie Vitals 

     Research Antivenom
Big defense bonus when facing zombies in or outside the fort. 
- Requires: Zombie Vitals, Stealth

Church
9. Bar: same as the Church, you may throw parties at the cost of 50 food with the same happiness gains of 10% with a citizen, 15% with a Leader, or 20% with Two Leaders.

10. Big Farm: this is the food producing apartment, provides for food than a regular farm, but may not be changed into anything else.

Useless Buildings/Tiles

1. Rubble, Park, Parking Lot: can be constructed into either Suburbs or Farms.

2. Motel: can be constructed into an Apartment or a School

3. 8-12 Mart, McNoodles, Warehouse: can be constructed into a Hospital or a Church

4. XXOR Gas: can be constructed into a Laboratory or a Bar

5. Graveyard: The most useless of all buildings, cannot be constructed into anything.


Special Buildings

1. City Hall: owning this allows you to create a city with 5 Leaders

2. Evil Graveyard: can destroy the Zed portal with 15 Soldiers

3. Mall: can be fortified to increase city defence against invading Zombies


In-Game Features

Survivors: You are a survivor, and your goal is to recruit other survivors and kill zombies. You can view the number of survivors you have on the bar on the top of the screen. Hovering your cursor over the picture of your survivors will tell you how many survivors you have, how many are unoccupied, and how many more survivors you may recruit.

Food: Keeps your survivors alive if you run out, your survivors will starve and may quite possibly die. You can see how much food you have left, how much you produce, and much does it take to sustain your survivors. Keeping tabs on this will help you a lot.

Happiness: If you do not have happiness, some survivors may leave you, and acquiring all but the conquest victory will require at least 50% Happiness. If you are unhappy all the time, you will not make it far into the game.

Random Encounters:  During your play, you may meet merchants, rival gangs, and events such as Zombie Shoot-Outs. There are many of them and most of them are bad, such as someone getting bit by a zombie and die, or a dog died and you lose happiness. Some good ones eliminate Zeds around you too, although they are few, and only appear when you have lots of Happiness.



GamePlay

The way you play the game is, each turn you are allowed to send units to surrounding tiles to either Scout, Scavenge, Kill Zombies, or Reclaim Land. You may only send one mission per tile. What I don't like about this game is that there is luck involved. If you send one of your only soldiers off early game with a 1% chance of death, and it actually dies, you have to start over or it will be hell for you. 

Early Game Tactics
When I start my game, I look for farms first. If you can't find any on the map, then you can either scout the area and see if you can locate of close by, or restart the game for a better map. Farms are my number one concern because if you do not scavenge enough, you will lose within 20-30 turns with  only one farm. While you are looking for your farms, you should also recruit some people and hope for some soldiers since they are extremely important early game, although you should not recruit too much or you won't have enough food for everyone. When you get about 3-4 farms (1 Big Farm=2 Farms), you should start recruiting more and scavenging more.

Middle Game Tactics
When you've got a decent military, maybe about 10-20 soldiers, and have about 30-40 population, you should find a school and make some more soldiers and construction workers. The reason for this is because you should start clearing out Zed infested tiles so that when they invade, they will be much weaker. With the Builders you can reclaim lands faster, you probably need about 3-4 at this part of the game. If you have those, you will be about to reclaim about 1 Tile per turn. If you have lots of food saved up, you should wait until you get more survivors, you never know when a Zed invasion may take one of your farms and starve you later on.

Late Game Tactics
So you now have about 50-60 soldiers with almost 80 Survivors in total. You should start looking for the City Hall or the Evil Graveyard to win this. Before you do this, you should know that taking these two will require lots of soldiers, so find and fortify some Malls and Wallmarts in case the Zombies attack while you are launching your attacks. During this time, you should also throw some parties to get happiness if you have an abundance of food, since Zombie-Shoot-Outs clear away lots of Zed around your city that may decide to attack.

Later Late Game Tactics
Well, here is when you've taken the City Hall or the Evil Graveyard, now it is time to claim both of them and find some Laboratories. If you found a Laboratory early on, you should start researching. Although, you would only need one so you don't need to claim any more until you have won by making a city or destroying the portal in the Evil Graveyard. When you have finished all the researches, you may begin finding a cure to Zombieism, then it will make conquering the whole map much easier for the last Ending.






If you would like to ask any more questions about this game please leave a comment and I'll answer. If you would like to play this game, the link will be on the bottom of the post. Also, a note, this review is of Rebuild 1, there is also a Rebuild 2, I won't be making a review of that, since it is similar to this, with just a few changes that you can see for yourself. I will be placing the Rebuild 2 link down below as well.


Rebuild
Rebuild 2


-The Rooster
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