For the last decade and a half, Zombies have been the de facto go-to monsters, replacing vampires, werewolves, goblins, and all matter of supernatural creatures in the public conscience.

• Genre: Zombie City-Builder
• Developer: Jutsu Games
• Publisher: Games Operators
• Release Date: 11 April, 2024
• Price: TBD
• Buy at: Steam
• Reviewed On: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 2080

The Last of Us, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Left for Dead, State of Decay, Dying Light, Project Zomboid, Resident Evil, Project Zomboid, and They Are Billions are just some of the hundreds of games that use the Zombie as their archetypal enemy.

It’s fascinating how malleable the creature is to different kinds of genres, be it real-time-strategy, action, shooters, or survival-horror, chances are if you’re imaginative enough as a game designer, you’ll be able to cram Zombies as an enemy almost anywhere.

Infection Free Zone does almost nothing new with Zombies and with its mechanics. However, a stroke of genius, a feature so incredible it turns Infection Free Zone from a generic survival-management-strategy game into an absolute gem well worth buying into. That feature is the game’s capability of letting you play anywhere in the world you want. Imagine Microsoft Flight Simulator but with Zombies.

It’s one thing to play in a fictional world, with fictional locations, but it’s a whole other experience to play in a known location, with streets you walk by every day, businesses you shop at, and parks where you exercise. If you want to be really nerdy, think of Infection Free Zone like this: Have you ever wondered “What would I do if a real-life zombie apocalypse happened?” and then proceeded to mentally design your plan? Infection Free Zombie is the “What would I do if a real-life zombie apocalypse happened” simulator.

The game uses OpenStreetMap’s real-world data to generate its maps. Similar to Microsoft Flight Simulator, the maps aren’t 100% accurate, but they’ll do their best to make it, at least believable. Buildings aren’t one-to-one recreations of their real-life counterparts, but if you know the location, your imagination will fill out the blanks, I know mine did. Given this OpenStreetMap-based system, Infection Free Zone is a videogame that will be at the top of its game when you’re playing in locations you know and are familiar with.

The game starts by challenging you to pick a location on the world map. Me being me, and since I live in Porto, Portugal. Of course, I was going to play my hometown. When choosing the playable area, my first question was: OK, here’s where I live, where would I realistically be able to go? Well, since Porto faces the Atlantic Ocean on the West, my best chance for survival might actually be having my back facing towards the sea, where no zombies could attack me.

How does Infection Free Zone play? Well, it’s very much like a real-time strategy/city-builder mixed with survival and some horror elements. It’s a mix that comes to its own when it’s paired up with this city creation system.

That’s what I did on my first playthrough, got a base set up with my back turned to the ocean, and focused on what was ahead of me, no need to spend extra resources building walls and watchtowers. The game eases you in with some guided and basic story elements. During the day your folk are gathering resources and erecting fortifications and utilities. At the same time, your armed squads are scavenging, looking for food, medicine, weapons and whatever else they can find (I’m not going to spoil any more). At night, the hordes come out and wander around the city, so it’s advisable that after 5 to 6 PM, everyone is back on the base and ready to man the defences.

Combat is simple enough. Your units will fire at the horde, slimming it down, and it eventually fails. Let them get too close and they’ll damage the buildings you’ve erected until they are basically useless and will be back again once you repair them. Each one of your squads can have up to 4 elements, and each can be equipped with a gun. These guns consume ammunition, so you better stock up before nightfall.

This night-and-day system doesn’t mean that things are uneventful for half of the time you’re playing. The zombie hordes will occupy buildings, and you might enter, because unless you saw them going in, there’s no way to know where they’re hiding from the sun. If the weather is cloudy enough, and the sun is covered, the infected will start roaming during the day. Raiders and other people roam the street, and you’ll only know they’re friends or foes once you’re close enough to talk to them. Again, basic systems, but they work and behave exactly as you would expect them to.

The graphics are servisable, at best, and downright horrible at worst, but I get it. A randomly generated map will never be perfect, and since I’m playing locations I know deeply, it is rather easy to suspend my disbelief at what I’m looking, at and imagine that that building isn’t how it looks in real life, but that’s the way I imagine it to be.

I would love to see some more details about the buildings I adapt. Say I build a cookhouse, maybe the building will change slightly to feature a small chimney, barrels of stuff outside, and a wooden board on the door saying “cookhouse”. Small things like that make the world feel more lived-in and end up being way more immersive. Imagine a living location with clotheslines outside, windows boarded up and figurines moving inside. There’s a lot to do to make things feel “lived in”.

Add this to things the game already has, and the world would really pick up a charm of its own. This is a lovely example of this: early in the game, you’ll be tasked with acquiring the knowledge necessary to build an antenna. Where did Infection Free Zone send me? To my local university. Gather more weapons and ammunition? To my local police station. To gather food? To local groceries, I know and visit. Where to get medicine? To my neighbourhood pharmacy.

Just you case you haven’t realized by now, I really enjoy the real-world Open Street Map map feature.

Now that I lured you in with the great stuff, it’s time for some disappointment. Have in mind that the game’s still in Early Access, so maybe, a lot of what I’m about to write is going to be fixed in a couple of weeks/months: The unit pathfinding is in dire need of some work. I’m not one to usually nitpick this kind of stuff, but when your game hinges so much on the path your units take when walking around the city to either avoid confrontations or get into them, this needs to be fixed ASAP. The worst offender of this is the location towards which your units enter buildings. In more cramped locations, they’ll go all around entire neighbourhoods just to get in, on the side, for example. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially when the door for a said house is clearly facing the street, for example.

The worst offender, to me, is how, for some reason I’m not able to understand at the moment, is that the infected can go trought some walls, but not others. This is very weird, and there seems to be no consistency in this. Sometimes they walk right on by, and your units too. Sometimes they don’t. It’s all really weird. I hope this gets fixed, as soon as possible because, as you can imagine, this is terrifyingly game-breaking in a game that’s all about building your base against the zombie hordes.

Jutsu Games, the developer of the game came out and said that the full story and all the faction’s events won’t be available on the Early Access launch. The same goes for map elevation, explosives, infected animals and a law system. These systems are still in the works but “due to balancing issues we have decided to prioritize other systems and focus on the list above once the game is released in Early Access”

Final Score: 8/10*

When all is said and done, Infection Free Zone doesn’t do anything novel with its systems, but what it manages to do is execute one unique feature extremely well, and the amount of gameplay variety that feature brings just by itself is going to be enough to keep me coming back time and time again. I cannot wait to see what the team does going forward, and I sincerely expect Infection Free Zone to be a success. It’s a great game, with a ton of potential I cannot wait to see expanded upon. If you like zombies, and turtling gameplay, and would like to see how you would fare in a zombie apocalypse, this might just be the videogame for you.

*This score is only applicable if the zombies going trough walls bug is fixed.

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