Sometimes you forget to build a cemetery. It happens. When ten citizens fell dead on the roads of one of my settlements in the post-apocalyptic city builder End zone 2I had to work quickly to prevent a disease from breaking out. But cemeteries require a lot of space, and if you've already filled your shanty town with a sea of corrugated iron roofs, this poses a problem. Welcome to the pleasant headache of urban planning in a post-nuclear world, where most of the land is brown and uninhabitable.
Endzone 2 ticks a lot of boxes as far as building games go, though it does have a little extra in CRPG-style scene exploration (more on that in a moment). You play as a group of underground survivors repopulating the surface. But the resentful land dictates your use of space, with little red squares of swamp or mountain or lake or wasteland refusing to accommodate your desire for more housing or a market in the perfect spot. The resulting townships often feel organic and real, rather than the endless rows of apartments or perfectly round suburbs that might be permissible in other building games.
There are many types of buildings to build, and many workers to assign. Little invisible fishermen will increase your food supply, little invisible weavers will increase your cloth stack. Many buildings get bonuses for being near others of a certain type. A charcoal kiln near a woodcutter's hut, for example. A storage depot near… uh, anything. But since you're sometimes forced to put things together in odd ways, you'll often have to abandon hopes of a perfect level of production. I think this is the game's quiet appeal. It's about efficiency, sure, about clicking a machine's knobs back and forth, but it's a machine that doesn't want to please you all the time. It says, “Look, that's just the way things are in the deadlands, accept it.”
There are times of seasonal danger that require you to stock up on supplies for a rainy day. A drought causes lakes to disappear entirely and your water reserves to quickly run out. Toxic rain demands protective clothing, or radiation sickness will strike your frontiersmen. This is definitely from the “ant versus locust” school of thought. construction games where tension arises from wanting to expand while also saving bags of food for successive crises (hello Far awayHello NorthgardHello Born in wood). So there is a certain level of constant threat. But beyond this tension, I found the whole thing oddly relaxing.
Maybe it’s because, at any time, you can leave the workshops running and go on a road trip. A toy truck provides Endzone 2’s secondary activity in the hunt for treasure. You guide the truck along the cracked roads of the garbage future, looting various ruins for additional resources. Some locations allow your drivers to exit the vehicle and explore the surroundings, interacting with objects from an isometric perspective in an almost CRPG-like style. Find an axe and force open some doors. Discover a book that will help you identify plants, thus unlocking new seeds to grow. Crack open a shipping container with a blowtorch and take out all the iron ingots inside, like a child in an irradiated yellow raincoat opening a long-lost Kinder egg.
This is also how you advance in the game's research tree. By exploring these urban slums and roadside dumps (sometimes quite far from your settlement), you gain “knowledge points” that allow you to advance in a traditional tech tree of mines, water treatment plants, baths, crematoria, not to mention many upgraded versions of the same buildings you already own.
It’s a nice distraction, and tying it into the research tree makes it feel important to treat yourself to getting out every now and then. That said, Endzone 2 is first and foremost a game about keeping track of green arrows and dispelling red arrows with sensible meter adjustments and on-the-fly building projects. This becomes clear once you use that same little exploration truck to establish entirely new settlements on the same large map, at which point the plate-spinning begins in earnest.
Each little patch of green, habitable land you discover will have different strengths and weaknesses. One settlement might get plenty of fresh water from many lakes, ideal for keeping a textile industry thriving. Another will be in the swamp, ideal for making medicinal herbs. Another might boast an iron ore vein to tap, or an iodine mine. Since each village on your wider map will specialise in these specific products, you'll need to establish transport links, again using the travel trucks as little trucks, shuttling back and forth between your towns with their boots full of syringes or rubber gloves or clay bricks or gas masks.
Over time, a little web of goods begins to form. Interdependent production chains emerge, and you might start trying to optimize things. Workshops will produce tools faster if there's a scrapyard and a lumberjack's hut nearby to provide materials, and fisheries will harvest more seafood when those toolmaking workshops are located nearby. It's a pretty standard base-building process that involves creating multiple cities with intersecting logistical needs. The challenge comes in placing these buildings when the terrain doesn't allow for perfect efficiency or when random decisions you made earlier have created sprawl that makes the placement of new buildings its own puzzle. Folks, are we really need a cemetery?
When a sudden drought or a wave of disease sweeps across the landscape and threatens the stability of your provincial havens, you end up tweaking those import and export routes in minute detail, trying to make sure Grimdork Lakes gets enough medicine from other cities, or that plenty of water is delivered to Garbageville (yes, you can rename your settlements). When toxic storms rage, a little Geiger counter shows how much radiation your settlers are exposed to. And you have to keep an eye on the ground, too, because it can become poisoned by radiation, too.
If the sound of the geiger doesn't unsettle you, the rickety voice acting might. The music also seems very tentative. The synthwave soundtrack, while not unpleasant in itself, doesn't mesh well with the art style or theme. It's the kind of music you hear in sci-fi space games, an almost robotic beat that might fit in if this were a base-building game set in a crumbling cyberpunk city. But against the bucolic backdrops and overgrown country houses it creates a strange clash of ambience. I turned the music down to 0% and put on a “relaxing guitar” playlist. It works a little better.
I have other questions. For a game about efficiency and production chains, there is sometimes unnecessary friction. The long loading times when resuming your save file will hopefully be fixed in Early Access. As for other things, I don't know. A pharmacist and a pharmacy are two different buildings you can create, for example: one to make medicine and one to distribute it. Not only do the similar names cause confusion, but it also seems excessive in a society that has to cut costs by nature. Can't one building do both?
There are other restrictive quirks. For example, since each settlement has its own set of resources, you have to alternate between cities, opening up the research tree in each one before finding the one with enough iron or glass or whatever to press the “research” button on a particular piece of tech. This also means that you sometimes have to funnel a handful of clay or medicine or clothing to where they’re needed, just to press a button, when your logistical brain is busy screaming “I’ve got all the stuff I need already!”
This is generally why games’ research and skill trees often operate on their own separate currency: it protects them from problems like this. But Endzone 2’s research tree doesn’t just require knowledge points, it also requires material goods. This makes it more rooted in your production and transportation network, yes, but it also leads to these sometimes unintuitive moments. It’s a slow game at times, even on its most advanced settings.
For those who prefer their logistics operations to be more abstract and orderly, this will not take you away from the factory lines of Form 2But it may be worth a look for those who prefer their number games wrapped in a thematic purpose. It has neither the moral nor the definite flavor of Punk ice cream (which, for me, remains the most striking post-apocalyptic city-building game), but it does enough with its humble scavengers and rescue expeditions to at least make you feel part of the population as a whole, even if that concern is always coupled with a selfish desire to keep resources from collapsing.
“Oh no, the people of Bogbottom are being hit by acid rain again,” you'll tell yourself. “This will slow down vaccine production.” You'd better start digging now, those bodies won't bury themselves.
