Rebuild is a post-apocalyptic strategy game where you are charged with bringing your town back to life after the zombies have overrun the world. This game is simple to play but hard to master; and impossible at the most difficult levels.
Resources:
You only have to keep track of three resources: housing, food, and happiness. Each is controlled by the buildings you have and a few random events.
Buildings:
Each square can be one of many buildings. Apartments and suburbs add housing. Farms add food. Churches and Bars add happiness. Hospitals prevent disease. Labs allow you to research upgrades. Schools will train your citizens. Malls and Police stations add defense. There are over a dozen more buildings that are worthless by themselves, but can be turned into something useful, such as a Park that can be converted to a Farm.
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| Your starting four squares. A good setup; close to the school, hospital, and an apartment. |
People:
There are several characters you have to manage in the city as well. You have soldiers for killing zombies, leaders for adding population, scavengers for finding food, builders for converting buildings, and scientists for research. People can change classes at a school, or generic survivors have the possibility of picking up a new specialty if they go along on missions.
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| Scavenger and Soldier |
Gameplay:
Each turn you chose which people to send on each mission. Squares need to be scouted; cleared of zombies, people, and food; assimilated into your city; then modified into something useful. Each step takes a certain amount of time, a certain class of people, and has a percentage of possibility for failure. Your choices manipulate all of these factors.
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| These people are not needed to guard (notice the 0%), so they need to go kill some zombies. |
At the end of each turn there is the possibility for a zombie invasion, so you have to leave a few troops behind for defense. If you survive the night, you see the results of each day’s activity and plan the next.
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| This is the closest to an action scene you get in the game. |
Graphics/Fun factor:
The game is very crude graphically. But in a turn-based strategy game, who cares? I played games on an Apple 2e, I don’t need fancy visuals if the game is fun. And this game is quite fun. There is an internal logic to the moves of the zombies that is hard to notice until you’ve played for several hours, but there is still an unpredictable element too. Even with only a 5% chance of failure, you will still fail from time to time. Your characters are all named, but you have no vested interest in them. For Rebuild 2, I would like to see some possibility for leveling of individuals so that if they were to die, you would really feel the pain of it. Each game presents a mostly random board, so it plays differently every time.
Difficulty:
This game has an appropriate amount of bleakness. This is a zombie hoard after all. Some death is inevitable, and total failure is always a possibility. The game has five difficulty levels. The first two are fairly easy, the third is a challenge, and both the fourth and fifth are impossible. I’ve started this game on the fourth level several hundred times and never beat it, let alone the fifth. If there is a trick to these levels, I’ve never figured it out. The third level is appropriately challenging and can be replayed to get the four different victory conditions, but if you are the type that HAS to beat every level, you might not want to even start this game because I’m convinced it can’t be done.
Recommendation:
Rebuild is a great throwback game. It reminds me a lot of the types of strategy games I played in Junior High on 5 inch floppy disk. The third level is perfectly balanced. Each time you play you get a slightly different experience due to the random factors and game board. As long as you don’t obsess about those final two levels, you can get a lot of fun out of a very simple game. I’d love to hear from anyone who has beat the fourth level and how they did it.
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