For me, acquaintance with this wonderful game began back in 2013. It was then that I first happened to see the zombie-one of the Letts-players played in it, the audience of which I happened to be. And even then, at such an early stage of development, the game interested me. Despite the unpretentious appearance, the game more than pleased with its filling. Interesting mechanics, pleasant subtleties, all this favorably distinguished the zombie among other zombies-survivors. And despite the fact that eight years have passed, the game has not frozen in a state of embryo, moreover, all new mechanics are still added to it. And since it is still relevant, and, as for me, it still significantly exceeds other games from this genre, I will tell you about it today. Let’s start.

The beginning of the game

The main menu

Even in the main menu, the zombie sets us up for the necessary mood. The screensaver in gloomy, dreary tones and the soundtrack of Biver perfectly cope with their task – the sound of classic instruments pulls you into a viscous quagmire, dipping with your head into a sense of complete hopelessness and despair. Strengthen these feelings of female howls and choral inserts – the sensations of the sinister presence and proximity of death were never felt stronger.

At the beginning of the new game, we are given a choice of several points.
The first column – Play style.
Survivor – an average option, not too complicated, allowing you to fight with a zombie from time to time, and even get out of these clashes by the winner, but not too easy, not allowing to relax and feel very comfortable to feel very comfortable.
Apocalypse – For lovers of difficulties and pains. The number of zombies increases significantly, their sensitivity and danger too. Clagings with the dead are already much more complicated, and often they will only aggravate the situation, so you have to play as carefully and secretly as possible.
Builder – If you do not like difficulties and skirmishes with walking, but love a more measured, calm game, the construction of your shelter, a systematic lounging of the map, the creation of your own farm – this mode is for you. The amount of zombies is reduced, the amount of things is increased.
Sandbox – differs from other modes in that it allows you to independently configure the world. Complete freedom of choice, you can change almost anything – from the number of certain varieties of things in houses, until the time of disconnecting water and electricity. Yes, even the zombies themselves can be configured in detail – to make them seeing, hearing, relying all the predators that will be able to track you down even a hundred meters, or, on the contrary, blind, deaf, helpless kittens with rotten. The most free, and, as for me, an interesting mode of game, which allows you to configure the world for yourself.

The second column, Testing, These are ready -made scenarios that allow you to test your strength, knowledge and skills in certain circumstances. I do not see the point of describing them in detail, because this is not a guide, but an intra -game description and so quite capaciously describes each of them. I will note only one of them – The island of Kingsmouth. In this test, the main map is replaced by the aforementioned island, full of weapons and bloodthirsty dead. Otherwise, the gameplay there is not very different from the game on an already familiar, standard map.

World Map

Finally, having decided on the game mode, we go further. Now we have to choose the starting city. However, this choice will not determine the boundaries of your capabilities – all these cities are part of one region, the NOX district, by which we will move freely. If the city you have chosen will not appeal to you, you can always move to another.

There are four starting https://slotonautscasino.co.uk/ cities in total – West Point, Maldro, Riverside, Rosewood.
Each city is unique in its own way. So, Riverside, the city is mainly one -story and surrounded by farms, while Rosewood is a very small town, next to which the Knox district is located. However, not only the location is affected by the choice of the city. Lut in them is also different-somewhere it is much easier to find weapons or generators, and somewhere you can get mountains of food in local stores and cafes. I will not talk more about cities, because, I repeat, this is not a guide, and I do not want to spoil the sensations from an independent study. Of particular interest is orientation on intra -game cards, but more on this later. Now my task is to make it clear that the choice of the initial city is important, and, having gained experience, you will also begin to approach the choice of a starting location with responsibility.

Creating a character

Choosing a starting city, and, in the case of a sandbox, setting up the necessary parameters, we proceed to the creation of a character. At the initial stage, this is the most important point – after all, we are allowed not only to choose profession, which gives bonuses to certain skills, but also characteristics character. Moreover, they will not let Mary Sue go for a walk and create a local analogue-starting glasses are hardly enough for something good. As the law of equal exchange reads in order to get something, you need to sacrifice something. And zombie follows this law. To get more points for positive skills or useful profession, you will have to choose negative features. Some of them may not be so critical – an unlikely character will be more slowly folding belongings, short -sighted – less review range. However, the more points the negative feature gives, the worse its effect. So, your in -game protege can be “bestowed” with excess weight, illiteracy, and even deafness.
Having decided on the characteristics of our character, we proceed to setting up the appearance. Paul, skin color, hairstyle and other vegetation on the face, their color, clothing are subject to choice. As far as I know, the sex of the character does not affect his parameters – in this regard, the game adheres to equality. Otherwise, you should not think that the hairstyle will remain forever – all this, except the color of the skin, of course, can be changed during the game, but we will talk about this later.

The appearance in the world and how the zombie looks like a zombie.

The beginning of the game meets us not the most pleasant words:
The end of the time has come.
There is no hope for survival.
This is the story of your death.
Realizing the whole deplorable of the situation, we appear in the game world. And it is here that it is worth telling about the appearance of the zombie. The game does not look very presentable – he gives the graphics crafts from the beginning of the zero, the models of objects and character threaten to cut you with the corners of their landfills. However, how should you not judge the book on the cover, you should not judge the sandbox by its appearance. It is worth judging by filling, and with this, good, Zomboid is all right. Despite not the best graphics, she does not hurt her eyes. Well -sustained color scheme and general style allow the game to look tolerable.

Interface

And before starting to play, we have to deal with the interface. And he, unfortunately, is far from perfect. At the top we have two stripes, pointing the cursor on which the windows fall. The first window is the inventory of our character, divided into tabs in case he has bags, backpacks, bags or bags in his hands. The second window, right, is, so to say, the “inventory” of the world around. It is there that the lutus lying on the floor or in any storage facilities will be displayed. And here misunderstandings already arise – the wearing things are easy to confuse with those that just lie in the inventory, because they are marked only by a small orange point. Things hanging on a belt or behind are marked with green. However, such a division makes a little understanding, and it will take some time to deal with it. In addition to inventory, several buttons are presented on the left. Heart button – a set of data about the character, including data on his health. You will have to regularly look into this tab, especially after skirmishes with a zombie, to track whether your precious hero was bitten. Like no way, he dies completely at death, and at the same time loses all his skills and experience. The second button is the craft menu, and the craft of everything. It is there that you will improve weapons, cook, create the necessary things and tools. And finally, the third button is the menu of interaction with furniture. It will help relatively conveniently, say, take and transfer the microwave, but will also require a certain addiction.

Freedom

And what next? And then – absolute freedom. The sandbox is the sandbox, which allows the player to do what he wants within the framework of the existing mechanic. And Project Zomboid, in the context of a zombie survival, has amazingly wide freedom of action.
You can start with a banal gathering. After all, everyone knows that the key to survival is the collection of everything and everything that can at least somehow be useful in the further difficult fate of our character. And here collecting is not limited to banal weapons and food supplies, in addition to them, the game presents many household items and not very use. Starting with the dishes necessary for cooking and storing food, ending with the office, which serves both in direct and not very purpose. And since I volunteered to tell you about freedom, I will tell you about her on points. And we will start with our character.

What can you do with your hero?

Clothing and appearance
Let’s start with a simple one. Many different clothing elements are scattered in the game world, and all of them can be on your character. It would seem who can be so surprised today? You can change your hero in many, but what is there, in many many games. However, even in this, the zombie managed to excel. In addition to the fact that you can combine clothes (first put on a T -shirt, then a T -shirt, then a shirt, then a jacket, and so on), you can choose clothes up to socks. And carries this choice not only cosmetic character. So, the character dressed in a leather cloak has much less chance of being bitten, but sweat is much faster. You need to dress in general according to the weather. You will dress easily in the rain – you will easily get sick, you will dress too easily on a sortie – any dead man will easily bite the unprotected part of the body. It would seem that a mechanic is already enough for such a thing as clothes, but this is far from all. Clothing gets dirty. In dirt, blood, sweat. And zombies can feel smells. Understand what it is? If you do not wash your clothes for too long (and you can wash it too, and you even need to), then the zombies will easily smell your character as a mile away. And if your character is also afraid of blood, then constant panic or fear in the clothes stained with it is provided with you.

Also, as your character plays, hair and bristles will grow. Yes, yes, just like in a witcher. Both to shave and cut yourself behind the estate of the necessary tools – scissors or razor in hand and forward, experiment on the appearance! But this is not all. Makeup remained for the dessert – cosmetics here and here are scattered on the voxy of the NOKS district and nightstands, and it can be used for its intended purpose.

Weapon
Dressed, tonsured, painted their precious character? Now it’s time to arm it. And not only classic bat and shotgun are suitable for this. You can arm the characters almost anything-a board found somewhere at a construction site, a pan found in the kitchen, an electric guitar from an dusty box. Yes, even a regular pencil is suitable for the destruction of living dead. Of course, it is not worth expecting an equal to normal weapon of efficiency from all this impromptu arsenal, but if nothing is better at hand, this is suitable and this is and this.

Also, weapons can be improved. Here, alas, there is not much variety – you can drive nails for more damage into the bit, there is a belt for a rifle, but nothing more. No excesses. An important point is the state of your weapon – it should be unusable as the bat will break at the most crucial moment, the gun will jam exactly when the crowd surrounds you. It will be necessary to repair it as parts of an identical weapon (to disassemble one shotgun to fix another), and by much more familiar things – nails, isolet, adhesive, glue.
Food
To survive, a person needs to eat. And although hunger as a mechanic is represented in many games, here it is also favorably different. Try to remember how the need for food in other games was implemented? Now and then a pop -up window that the character was hungry? Numbers that make it clear how much more the character will not ask to eat? And the food itself, which simply gives different number of sites of satiety? But what if I tell you that the mechanics of hunger and food in zomboid are more realistic than anywhere else? Not only can the character can be fed up with hunger, and all this will affect his weight, condition, amount of strength and mood, so he can be selected by calories, and, moreover, by the number of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Cooking here is a separate skill and a separate, very important activity. The number of dishes in the game is quite large, and, moreover, you can select the ingredients for some of them yourself. So, for example, what will you choose from the salad yourself. It can be either purely fruit and with the addition of, say, ham. Thus, the character can not only be fed, but fed by the mind so that it is fed up, and the mood is good and not gaining excess weight
Transport and auto mechanic
They fed their survivor? Now it’s time and on the road. And to tap the travels between the points of interest in the game, cars are presented. And they are also not as simple in the game as they seem. First, they need to be refueled. It would seem that such a banal thing, but also not represented everywhere. In addition to banal driving, you can transport your precious good in the car. Moreover, we can add it not only in the trunk, because if the place is over there, we can put the rest on one of the seats, or even everything. Also, as we recall from the above, the character may freeze. But this does not matter! In the car, we can always turn on the stove to warm our survivor. And how you warm up, so immediately begins to get into a dream. And this is possible! If you have not found a shelter yet, or the night overtook you on the road, you can always spend the night right in the car. The main thing is to close the doors so that the uninvited guests do not look at you in the middle of the night. But this, as they say, is not a fairy tale, this is just a lubricant. The machine, like any other mechanism, wears out. And if you are not lucky to take already a well -worn car – you have every chance of stall or lose the wheel right in the middle of the crowd of living dead. And what to do, how to avoid such a situation? An exciting auto mechanic comes to the meeting. The car can almost be completely disassembled to parts, and replace them with the same parts from another car. Everything changes, from banal wheels and headlights, to batteries, brake pads, and even a suspension. And all this is not just like that, but with the necessary tools. Want to remove the wheel? Please take a cross -shaped key and a jack. Want to fix the hood? Bring the welding machine and metal parts. Of course, for more complex manipulations, a high skill in this area is needed, but the very possibility of such a detailed repair of your transport is amazing.

Construction
They overlapped the whole city and finally found a worthy refuge? It’s time to strengthen it. So that the walls are tall, and boxes, but more, and rain water could be collected. And all this is possible. Moreover, shelter is built not in any places prepared in advance, and not somehow abstractly, a la-brought bricks-improved the walls. Everything is as direct and realistic as possible. Need a box? Drag tools, boards, nails. Need a fence? Logs, ropes. Doors? Hinges, pen, all the same nails and boards, and it is yours. And no restrictions on the construction site – you can strengthen and finish any house in absolutely any place. Yes, even from scratch to build it. It is also important to think about security. Pounding the windows with boards, or brew it with a metal sheet? The choice is yours.

And with a recent update, the new mechanics allowed you to put things like your soul. How to understand it? Remember the conditional shelves in some game. You put things in them, but they are displayed on it prepared in advance, things set by the developer. Immediately, the new mechanics allows you to turn the sterile, empty rooms into a real monastery of the recluse.