Quick Look: March of the Living

The dead marches on.

the living never have enough bullets

I thought they would dress up the menus a bit more before this came out.

Can't we for once have the dead marching somewhere? Tired of this 'living' crap.

Looks cool

Now I want a Typing of the March of the Living cross over.

Come on guys, get with the times, it's already May of the living

Kind of a neat concept; I can definitely see the FTL influence. Can't help but wonder if they're riding on the "Walking Dead" popularity, though.

Also, although the writing is technically well done, the "random encounters" look like they may have made sense in the head of the author, but are utterly bizarre to anyone on the outside.

"There is a man impaled on a road lined with metal spikes". Uh, what? How big are the spikes? How did they get there? How did the man get there? How did YOU, the player, get there? And, in general, the writing falls into the trap of "telling, not showing". Lots of text saying "You feel angry. You feel sad. You feel enraged."

This seems like a lot of fun

I like how the unarmed man had a loaded revolver on his corpse.

Snake, "Cordite" was a smokeless propellant developed by the British in the late 19th century to replace gunpowder, so named for its long, uncooked-spaghetti-looking appearance. It was used in small arms ammunition, artillery shells, rockets, and so on. It was mostly used by commonwealth countries, and they stopped around the turn of the 21st century.

People say "cordite smell" because cordite is the only smokeless propellant that has an interesting-sounding name that people recognize, and smokeless powder by and large doesn't have a strongly recognizable smell (unlike the sulfurous odor of gunpowder/black powder).

SIGINT OUT.

I was hoping by being named "March of the Living", you played as one of the last remaining zombies trying to survive in a world overrun by humans.

Huh. This QL was the first time you got a party member? And then they went through like 3 clear opportunities (assuming the doctor had some percentage chance of being recruited if you gave him the food no strings attached)...I was worried it was too hard to actually make a party, but it seems you just need to be open to the gameness of the choices.

EDIT - I'm not sure if the combat is intended to be hectic or Alex's lack of familiarity with having more than one member did a number on things but it does seem clunky.

It was a great look guys. Just seems it's lacking a little panache for Vinny's classic release of Chaos.

Wow, Barry is really rockin' that axe. I'm going to call him 'the Hatchet'.
Yes.
Barry the Hatchet.

This looks really neat, on the Steam Wishlist it goes~

@startrunning: did someone say Billy Hatcher?

Looks very cool. And, sure, $15 is reasonable for the size we saw of the maps.

Who are Greg and Barry?

So many games like this, pretty sure I played something very similar in a web flash game years ago... wonder if it's the same people?

Just doesn't seem particularly well done for this type, the copy is especially mediocre which is kind of the place it seems like it's trying to shine.

#FreeElliot

These Madam Secretary ads make me really want to watch Bad Boys again...

As much as I understand the necessity of being able to suspend disbelief while playing video games, for whatever reason I just can't seem to be able to do it with this one. In FTL, it is easy to understand why a random encounter poses a threat—enemy ships have ranged weapons, the means of traversal in your ship requires a recharge, and more generally speaking one could easily intuit that perhaps their ship would be incapable of outrunning another, making a battle a requirement for survival. FTL amplifies this feeling further yet by abstracting the battles—they do not take place in a physical space, so as a player you are completely locked in to your fight, never given the illusion that you can do anything outside of the systems the game puts in front of you.

This game does none of those things. The battles take place in a physical space, so as soon as you freely move your character harmlessly through a pack of zombies—and at a much faster pace than they could ever keep up with—the façade is broken. Every single one of these encounters feels not only superfluous but also downright idiotic to ever engage in at all from a survivability perspective, with the exception of that one later-game zombie that was faster and a legit threat. I'm not explaining myself super well, but it seems very poorly conceived to me.

Then there are smaller things that bother me—a car just recklessly whizzed by in a story beat, indicating to us that cars at least occasionally still function, but your character has no problem sleeping in the middle of the fucking road?

I don't mean to be hypercritical or petty, and I don't get joy in shooting down small games, but those sorts of things add up. For a type of game that isn't terribly rare, a game would have to be truly exceptional to stand out from some really great ones. Between the mediocre writing, unchanging environments, and everything else I've said, this seems pretty uninspired.

I think it's ok to call a game that does a bunch of things in a mediocre fashion 'mediocre', whether that game is small or not.

Certainly the descriptive writing feels sketchy and or lack of a better word - 'teenaged'. It's full of melodrama and forced grittiness and shows little sense of how interactions between people actually develop.

The map looks largely superfluous. There are so many connections and no sense of place in any of them save for the cities. In FTL, one could look at the map and plot paths through nebulae or civilian sectors based on immediate need. This has... what... five times the nodes? but they are all identical so nothing can be gleaned from them.

It seemed to me that you own damage but also fatigue and hunger affected your walk/run speed. I could be wrong, but I think the player speed was variable. At the end Alex was moving much slower while he was damaged...

The traversal across the map seems really slow and boring, the polar opposite to FTL's instant traversal into a new event. Feels like the map should have 75% less nodes to travel to, to trim the fat and make it a better, more interesting experience. Basically turn it into FTL's sectors.

The events themselves remind me of Thea: The Awakening, a cool 4X/survival roguelike mix. But Thea turns every event into a life-and-death thing, where bad choices or just a lack of supplies/skills can lead to dire results.

It's kind of surprising how many of these FTLalikes are missing the brevity that made FTL so fun. Convoy, this game, and some others...

This seems like a decent concept with some game play issues but i could see a sequel that refines everything being compelling.