Highlights
- Dead Season is a turn-based tactics zombie survival game with a unique twist.
- Players control a group of survivors in a 16-mission campaign, scavenging for weapons and consumables.
- The game features a narrative with Max Payne-like motion comics and memorable moments through its challenging gameplay.
After a wave of relatively similar action-focused zombie games like Back 4 Blood, Dying Light 2, and Dead Island 2, the zombie genre needs a bit of a refresh. Now more than ever, zombie game fans are looking for something completely new, and a great place to find that is Steam. Though fans might have to wade through piles of shovelware to get there, Steam has a few experimental zombie games on offer, and the upcoming Dead Season is one worth watching.
Set for release sometime in 2024, Dead Season is a zombie survival game with a turn-based tactics twist. A project being developed by just one person, Dead Season recently released a demo for Steam Next Fest, and initial impressions seem quite positive. Those looking for a new take on the zombie genre and fans of games like Resident Evil and XCOM should make sure they keep an eye on Dead Season.
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Dead Season Puts a Zombie Twist on Turn-Based Tactics
Dead Season's Mix of Survival and Turn-Based Gameplay
From a surface level, Dead Season seems to play quite similarly to XCOM and other turn-based tactics games. In Dead Season, players will take control of a group of four survivors as they scrape through 16 missions of a single-player campaign. In each of these missions, players will need to complete various objectives, such as clearing a house full of zombies and barricading its windows and doors shut. Dead Season is played from an XCOM-like top-down perspective, and combat will have players move, shoot, and melee zombies in a turn-based pattern.
While turn-based combat is the real meat and potatoes of Dead Season's gameplay, the Indie zombie game also has a scavenging system. Throughout the course of a level, players will need to search their environment for new weapons and consumables, borrowing a few elements from survival horror games like Resident Evil. Stealth will also play a role in Dead Season's gameplay, as noise attracts large groups of enemies. Players will be able to attach items to their weapons to aid them in combat, such as an oil filter that can be used to suppress a weapon's sound for three shots.
According to Dead Season's Steam page, players will also be able to level up their survivors during the campaign, which grants them special abilities that can be used in combat, such as the ability to heal themselves by healing their teammates. Dead Season isn't shying away from the gore often associated with its genre either, with each kill resulting in a brief but satisfying spattering of blood and viscera.
Dead Season's Narrative
Though it's being developed by just one person, Dead Season is promising a rather lengthy 16-mission campaign. Dotted throughout the campaign will be an array of Max Payne-like motion comics that will help to progress the story from mission to mission and give fans a bit more information about the game's core cast of survivors. But much like other turn-based tactics games, most of Dead Season's most memorable narrative moments will likely come from the gameplay itself, with the genre's infamously difficult percentage hit/miss system being likely to cause both some incredibly frustrating moments and some unbelievably cinematic ones.
