Zone of Doom: Isolation First review: Nanny simulator

As a survival game, Zone of Doom: Isolation isn't too much fun.

It is difficult for you to enjoy the sense of accomplishment of "big construction completed" in similar games, and the settlement will be destroyed in the process of constantly solving the same problem, the biggest dilemma created by the whole game for the player is fertility and reproduction, and the solution is also fertility and reproduction, this design will throw the player into the "Ouroboros" dilemma. You create problems as you solve them, and you repeat and repeat until you die, so much so that there is still an unpleasant sense of destiny at the end, which seems to be something to savor in this game.

"Doomsday Zone: Isolation" and P's "Doomsday survival", in the appearance is quite similar, so that I almost thought that this is the same game, but after the real play will find that the core of the two is completely different.

As mentioned above, Doomzone: Isolation sets the answer to the problem as the problem itself, which makes it easier for the game to enter the end of death. In contrast, in P Society's "Survival at the end of the day", the answer to the problem is just an answer, the idea is quite simple, and the game can gradually break free from the dilemma in the later stage, which can be specifically explained from the way the two regulate the population.

The former is, as the name suggests, "isolated".

The player's population is completely dependent on self-production and self-marketing, and the way to produce human resources is to have children, which makes it difficult to control human resources in the game, and the specific model is very similar to the composition of China's rural population before "family planning". All facilities depend on human power, so if you want to develop better, you need to build more facilities, run these facilities need more people, and the population consumes resources, and will create survival difficulties, so what is the solution? Back to having kids.

So in Zone of Doom: Isolation, being poor requires having children, having children makes you poorer, and once the population is out of control, the destruction of the colony will only take a short quarter. You run deficits because your infrastructure can't keep up with runaway population growth. Then, due to the population explosion, the reserve resources were exhausted in a disaster, and the population and resources could not reach a balance, and the gathering place directly entered the abyss of destruction, or even could not return to the original balance point.

You probably thought starving a few people would equalize the population. No, it wouldn't. In Zone of Doom: Isolation, the relationship between population and resource production is very close, and unnatural deaths mean that there are job vacancies, causing resources and population to fall out of balance, and then it will slide again.

So what the player is actually doing in Zone of Doom: Isolation is taking care of the residents giving birth.

The population management method chosen by "Survival at the end of the Day" is even better in terms of controllability. On the one hand, players rely on having children, on the other hand, because they can accept survivors from other places, so that players can control part of the human resources, and add a ray of life to the game. If human resources are insufficient, accept them, and if human resources are abundant, reject them. This kind of control means makes the human resources of Doomsday survival more controllable.

This is exactly what "Zone of Doom: Isolation" lacks. It is not that we cannot accept foreign residents, but there is no direct and effective way to control the population. The effective way to control the population in the game is to send them to the gathering place and reduce the desire to have children. However, because the Doomsday Zone: Isolation has no direct control over specific residents, it is difficult to remedy the situation once the player finds that the manpower cannot keep up, because at that time, it is too late to regenerate children.

In order to hoard resources and reduce the fertility desire of residents on a large scale, the gathering place will enter the stage of aging, and the next group of residents will not be able to take over the production work, resulting in job vacancies, and the imbalance of resources will cause the gathering place to enter the dilemma of extinction.

This points to another problem with Zone of Doom: Isolation: Most of the resources can't be quantified.

Just imagine, if the player knows his current human resource ratio, there are specific loopholes, it can be adjusted in time, and then the next batch of residents can be more effectively allocated to various positions. But the actual situation is that in this game, the player can only simply see the statistics of resources, can not get more specific information, and even can not know the specific human output, everything is done by feeling.

When your drinking water resources suddenly enter the cliff, the player can not know how much they are worse at the first time, then there is no way to make an emergency response, which makes the learning cost of this work increased. You need to watch for a while to know if your current manpower ratio is scientific, which is enough time for the disaster to get out of control, if you put a lot of manpower at once, then other resources will be stretched.

An uncontrollable population, resources that are hard to quantify, what does it take to qualify as a doomsday zone? A bunch of unmotivated residents, and yes, this game is yours too.

There is a measure of happiness in the game, the principle is low happiness work efficiency and the desire to have children double decline. In other words, if the residents are unhappy, then they express anger in this way, and when they are happy, they are more active in having children and creating stress. The player is thus placed in the position of nanny, and all the residents seem to chant "Let's go to bed happily and have children!" Hurry up!"

It may be that the AI is rigid, or it may be that this group of people really do not have a sense of survival, you can see the residents starve to death next to a high corn field, die of thirst next to a collector full of rainwater, see the doctor simply closed the hospital because of his illness. Everyone only cares about their own work, so the farmer who hides at home and sleeps will not care about the young people starving to death near the fields, the water workers will only step over the dead bodies and carry another bucket of water, the disaster is serious outside, and the doctor will stick to the bottom line of the eight-hour work day. It happens all the time, especially when the colony is in decline.

Nearly a hundred residents were lost in an instant, and only four people were left walking around the fields like zombies. Low happiness means that these four people will not reproduce, it means that they have given up the desire to survive, even if there is plenty of food and water, but even if they give up survival, they are still working mechanically. Sick residents pass through the hospital three times, eventually die on the way to repair the empty house, construction workers after the erection of a telephone pole, the last breath, a grown man and woman who could have had a baby to continue their hope, but they chose to stick to their wedding vows.

With no migrants moving in, the survivors end up buried in the settlement with their marriages and responsibilities, until the yellow sands obscure hope. This is the most savoury aspect of The Doomzone: Isolation, a process of extinction. So much so that the content built in the later stages of this game is really a little empty, and it is not as interesting as experiencing extinction.

In general, if you want to enjoy the joy of surviving from the end of the world to rebuilding the world, then Doomzone: Isolation is not enough for you, because the later content of the game is a little tired, even empty and repetitive. Resources cannot be quantified or managed, and the ultimate goal of the inhabitants is to go to bed happily and have children, all of which is ultimately the responsibility of the player. To put it bluntly, in this game, you are the birth nanny of dozens of people, and you will lament the wisdom of "family planning" countless times.

If you want to experience a "Malthusian" human ending, then The Doomzone: Isolation is not bad, but if you want to play a good survival game, then the performance of this game is only mediocre, because the Doomzone: As an early access survival game, there is indeed room for further improvement.