Players who enjoy zombie or zombie apocalypse games are practically living in a golden era. Almost every week a new Z-themed title is released, with many of them delivering their own unique take and gameplay elements. Over the past year or so we have reviewed ones like Microprose’s Urban Strife, which was a really great tactical RPG with strong story elements and Kioop’s Dread Dawn which rendered an entire zombie-infested 2D world for us to explore and fight over. And perennial favorites like 7 Days to Die or the State of Decay series continued to experience new content updates, sometimes in major ways that really improved those titles for the better. Even the biker-based Days Gone title recently got a PlayStation 5 remaster that pulled it back from the dead.
Enter into this zombie arena the newly released Final Outpost: Definitive Edition, which is available on the Steam platform and also for mobile gamers using iOS or Android phones. It too adds a unique take on this popular genre. And as one might expect from a title with one foot in the PC and the other in the mobile world, the emphasis here is on strategy and critical thinking as opposed to graphical fidelity or presenting a huge open world. Final Outpost instead gives players the opportunity to manage a small community of survivors who gather resources and build up defenses during the day and then defend their land once night falls.
There is the most basic of plots in Final Outpost. A couple is caught at the end of the world when zombies attack, and they head off in search of safety. They meet up with another couple, and the four of them decide to build a little fenced or walled community out in the woods to try and survive the nightly onslaughts of the walking dead. This is all told through a brief cut scene. And incidentally, each one of those people will become one of the first four archetypes needed to run the settlement, namely a hunter, lumberjack, scavenger and a knife fighter.
After the introduction, players are shown the overview map of the settlement, which at first is a combination of open fields, wooded areas and a junkyard. The playing field is divided up into six major segments, with only one unlocked when you first start playing. The others can be unlocked by developing shovels (which is a technology you will also have to unlock) at your forge and then spending resources and assigning people to start digging. One good thing is that zombies don’t attack and can’t penetrate the locked areas of your base. They will only attack places where you are currently playing, which at first is just the middle segment on the left side of the map. There are 16 spaces to build on at the initial plot of land, so you won’t have to unlock the others for a little while.
Gameplay in Final Outpost consists of two stages. The first is the daylight phase where you will gather resources, build or repair defenses and construct buildings like houses for people to live in or resource-generation assets like fields or mines. The second is the night phase when the zombies attack the walls of any unlocked part of your base, and you will need to defend them until morning. Although the night phase can be tough because if a zombie breaks down your wall the game will end, the daytime phase is much more complicated and where you will be spending most of your strategic brainpower.
You control your people by assigning them jobs on a big board. Jobs include things like the four key ones you start with, while others like miners, farmers, workers and blacksmiths will unlock as you spend resources to upgrade your base. In addition to the first four people you start with, you will quickly have the opportunity to bring in others as they show up at the gate and can be clicked on to add to your settlement so long as you have enough housing for them. Babies can also be born to add to your population (fully grown and ready to take on any available job apparently) but the child-bearing process is really slow, and it’s dependent on people having idle time inside your settlement so they can concentrate on other things like reproduction. And at least at first, you won’t have the luxury of idle workers.
The cool thing about job assignments in Final Outpost is that they can change rapidly as needed simply by switching out the pips on the job board. So, for example, you might have 10 lumberjacks working on wood production during the day out in the forest, and then when night falls you can quickly switch them to knife fighters to defend your walls. The only downside to this rapid switching process is that, well, it can get tedious after a while since you are constantly clicking to switch up jobs, and secondly, this does not give settlers any time to walk around idle. They don’t need to sleep or rest but won’t have time for baby making if they are working all the time.
The key to success in Final Outpost is efficiently gathering resources. You will need wood, scrap metal and food at the most basic level, which is gathered by sending people with those job titles out into the world during the day. There is no micromanagement either. Simply assign someone to the lumberjack profession (after you have crafted them an axe) and they will run off into the woods to work. Hunters too go off with their crafted bows to try and bring down deer, and you can make more reliable food production with farms and farmers later in the story. You will also need a lot of resources to upgrade your facilities to the point where storage of those resources becomes a problem. If you need 600 wood to upgrade but only have space to store 500 and no free plots of land, then you need to open up a new area on the map, which means zombies will attack that new side once night falls.
The nighttime phase is comparatively simple compared to the daylight one. Knife fighters patrol the wall and attack zombies that get too close while soldiers in turrets (if you have them) will shoot with heavy crossbows or guns later in the game so long as you keep them supplied with ammo and projectiles. There is also a special blood moon every four days which brings out more powerful zombies and bigger attacks, but if you survive it, you earn perk points which can be applied to your entire realm, like having resource gatherers walk faster or knife fighters do more damage. In general, more and more zombies start coming out each night the longer you survive, so while there is no explicit timer on your operations, you need to set a somewhat steady pace for upgrades to avoid getting overwhelmed.
There is also a sort of endgame or goal. Eventually you will uncover an RV parked in one of the base areas you unlock. You can trade with merchants who sometimes come to your settlement (once you build a radio tower) and use their parts to fix up the old behemoth. Then you can pack people up and head off to a new settlement on a big map, but for most players that is going to be a very long-term goal at best.
If I had any criticism of Final Outpost, it would be that the difficulty steps up really fast. Once you hit about 30 or 40 days in, it becomes very difficult to balance the number of people that you need with trying to feed them all. Even finding enough space for the massive number of resources required for upgrades becomes problematic, which requires unlocking more play areas, which triggers more zombie attacks. And then you are back at the need for more people. You will be clicking to change out settler jobs a lot as you try and balance everything. Experts who play Final Outpost a lot probably can find a golden path to follow, but I certainly struggled with it the first few runs that I attempted. My settlement was always on the edge of ruin, although I suppose that added an element of excitement.
Final Outpost: Definitive Editon is a lot of fun, especially for those who enjoy management simulations, which is what this basically is under the zombie-themed surface. It’s one of those titles that is somewhat easy to learn but very difficult to master and plays well whether you are attempting to survive the undead apocalypse on your gaming PC or smartphone.