Zombie games have been white hot for a while now, to the point where we are starting to see some unique takes on the genre. For example, Quarantine Zone: The Last Check recently put players in charge of a military checkpoint and medical facility in a city that had long-since fallen to the zombie hordes. And now, After Inc: Revival, which is available for iOS, Android and the PC through the Steam platform, goes even farther as survivors begin to peek their heads out of bunkers many years after the entire world has fallen victim to a zombie-pandemic.
The interesting thing is that After Inc: Revival is developed by Ndemic Creations, which is the studio behind the genius Plague Inc: Evolved game from 2016. In Plague Inc, players took on the role of a super-virus mutating and evolving quickly to try and outrun humanity’s best efforts at combatting the plague. Players won by infecting the entire world and killing most of the population. This was, of course, released a few years before COVID-19, so the idea of a global pandemic was kind of fun back when such a thing was solely confined to the realm of science fiction. In any case, After Inc: Revival takes place after the plague from the other game has destroyed the world, and a select few survivors are ready to rise up and rebuild.
After Inc: Revival is a mission-based, real-time survivor title that is also, in a way, broken down into turns. Your main resource that is spent to do anything is stamina, which slowly refreshes over time, and which can be influenced by things like how big your current settlement is and other things like story-based decisions you make along the way or what type of leader your colony is following. So, the world runs at a constant speed with those inside your colony drinking water, eating food and consuming other resources, but to build things like wells or farms you need to spend stamina points. The conflict happens when your people need multiple things at the same time, but you can only prioritize so much before your stamina is temporarily depleted. So tough decisions will have to be made and remade, again and again, as you play.
Every level in After Inc: Revival starts out small with just a few people settling in a single territory on a large map where everything else is hidden by a fog of war. You will need to satisfy four basic resources for your survivors at the start including water, food, wood and fuel. Wood is your basic building block that is used to make most other things, so if you want to build a new well to produce water, then you will need so many units of wood first. Water and food are consumed directly by your people, while fuel is only used during the always-approaching winter season to keep everyone from freezing – although you do need to construct the fire pits first.
But you can’t just spend your precious stamina on resource-generating buildings because unless you get a really good starting place, most likely things like good farmland or tree-filled forests will not be present in your starting area. So, you will need to spend stamina on exploring all around your new town to try and find places where you can build up that life-supporting infrastructure. At the same time, your settlers will start to demand things like toilets or public kitchens (which need to be built using resources like wood), and they’re consuming resources like water. And with only so much stamina to go around at any one time, you will often feel like you are running at full speed trying to meet everyone’s needs while also expanding to support future growth.
As your colony grows, so do the needs of your settlers. At the most basic level, more people mean higher water and food consumption. But they will also start to ask for more advanced services like town squares and markets, many of which can only be accessed by investing in higher technology levels. Increasing your technology level is expensive both in terms of resources and stamina, but it is absolutely necessary if your colony is going to survive. Higher tech levels also unlock new resources like medicine and stone, which is great other than the fact that your settlers will start demanding services that consume those resources.
The reason why you have to cater to your sometimes picky survivors is that there’s a morale scale that you have to keep high. If morale falls too low because your people demand bath houses or tailor shops and you can’t provide them fast enough, they will start to leave your town. And if your population falls to zero, you lose.
Of course, this is also not your typical city or world builder. After Inc: Revival takes place following the events of Plague Inc. The world was overrun with infected people who became zombies. Although many years have passed, quite a few of the zombies still roam the Earth. You will get indications that zombies are lurking in unexplored spaces on the map by little red sonar-like indicators. When uncovered, you will see them as little red dots. Certain map spaces also act as generators where multiple zombies can be produced over time until cleansed. All of those zombies can wander into your claimed lands and disrupt your production there, to say nothing for tanking your settlers’ morale.
To defend your lands and take the fight to the enemy, you will need to train fighters. These special units can be moved around the map on defensive missions or for attack operations. The combat interface is pretty basic, with fights playing out automatically when zombies and fighters meet. But you can increase your chances, however, with some strategic gameplay.
Fighters in adjacent territories support and boost those who are fighting, and the number of claimed territories in the area also helps. You can even use a taunt action, which like everything else will cost you stamina, to lure nearby zombies into areas that are more tactically favorable for your side. Finally, your fighters get more powerful at higher technology levels and can get stronger with new abilities after earning combat experience.
After Inc: Revival also has a persistent world in that each time you win a level, you earn contribution points toward global rewards or outright perks that will affect all future games for new settlements. That might mean anything from getting more starting resources to using pigeons as a free food source at your home base to having more efficient toilets for all future expansions. Generally, you are given one of three options to pick from whenever permanent bonuses are offered.
Technically, After Inc is still in Steam Early Access, but you would hardly know it as it’s already really well developed. Currently there are three full multi-level campaigns to tackle and a rotating group of three temporary scenarios that are constantly changing and only available for a few days at a time. And yes, those temporary missions count, if you complete them, toward your global and permanent buffs and bonuses.
That provides nearly unlimited replay, although technically what you are getting is a steady stream of new content to tackle every few days, which is quite a commitment and an achievement for the developer.
The one possible negative is that all of the maps seem to be about the same size, and most scenarios pretty much play out the same way each time. And once you understand core gameplay elements like how cattle and sheep farms, if available, are better investments than fruit orchards or wheat fields because they keep producing during the winter, or how loading up on food in general is a lot easier than maintaining fuel or wood stocks, future scenarios get a lot easier to play.
Some people might find that a bit dull over time, although I personally enjoyed tackling all of the optional campaigns every few days and earning more perks for my future runs, and I still play all of those optional missions when I can every few days.
In the end, After Inc: Revival succeeds because it does not just slap zombies onto a city builder and call it a day. It creates a smart survival strategy experience where every decision matters from where to expand and what to build to how much risk to take when the undead start pressing in on your borders. Even if some maps and scenarios can begin to feel familiar over time, the excellent pacing, persistent rewards and constant pressure to balance survival with growth make this one of the more interesting and addictive strategy titles to emerge from the zombie genre in quite a while.