Mixed performance mars an otherwise engaging and unique survival horror game. If you're patient, I recommend it.
There is no story. You can insert whatever excuse you wish for the Zombie's existence. In fact the only things set in stone are the place (Piety, Indiana), the main character (Bill Reilly), and the inevitable zombie tsunami. The game is spent preparing for that "tsunami".
Fort Zombie is a RPG. At the start of the game you will design your character by picking from various backgrounds. Each background grants a skill set. You will then pick points to spend in enhancing the proficiency of any skill. As the game is combat oriented, I highly recommend raising Finesse and choosing a primary combat skill (most likely pistols). The reason's for this being that you will be alone for a long time, and if you aren't proficient in dealing death then you will die...period. That aside there are uses for the other skills. For example a high skill in Carpentry will allow you to build traps and barricades faster. A high Spot skill will allow you to find more loot and supplies. A high electricity skill will allow you to maximize your fort's generator allowing you to keep those lights running. The actual skills then level up by use, but given the game's length whatever choices you make in the beginning will likely be your primary stats.
While the amount of options available to you in terms of Skills and Attributes are cool, it's a bit disappointing that the same amount of effort wasn't put into other aspects of character creation.You can't change your name, your looks, anything. it would've been nice to create all manner of different looking player characters and give them cool nicknames. While it's a minor complaint it would've enhanced the RPG experience greatly.
Anyway, after creating your character you'll then proceed to choose your fort. There are three forts in order of difficulty; the Police Station, the Prison, and the School. Each fort is very well designed and there's no way to make it impregnable, so similar to the last stands in Left 4 Dead there will always be a way in that you can't defend well. Unlike that game; however you can minimize the zombies' chances. I discuss this more later, but basically the game forces you to make choices.
Of course before you can worry about defending a fort you have to get there. You'll travel across Piety, a randomly generated city with each playthrough, to get there. Upon arriving at the fort and clearing it out, the real meat of the game begins. You can now begin planning out your defense, creating traps and barricading stairwells. You'll spend quite a bit of time exploring your fort for all of it's openings and prioritizing which ones need blocked. Of course that's not all you'll be doing. You'll need other people's help if you're to survive and so you'll need to find survivors. Of course you need to feed those survivors, and so you'll look for supplies. And lastly if those survivors are going to be of any use in the final battle, they'll need guns. In order to get any of these things you'll need to go on "missions".
On your map there are various mission points. Each point is color-coded for a various mission, green for weapons, purple for supplies, and blue for survivors. Depending on your scout skill, the game will let you know how much time is needed to travel to that point. As you don't want to get caught out after dark, you'll need to make sure you have plenty of time to not only arrive, but also return after each mission. The clock also ticks slowly in each mission, so you can't take forever. Again you have to prioritize.
And that's basically the game. When you're not gathering ammo, weapons, and supplies you could be finding more survivors. If you're doing neither then you'l be building defenses and assigning people to help build those defenses. There are other tasks you can assign people too such as Doctoring, which assuming you have enough medical supplies, will allow a certain character to heal everyone. You have about two weeks of this, and it can be very tense trying to get more people and trying to feed them all. A mission could go bad and you return with no food and badly wounded. Such an event could be compounded by the fact that you just ran out of medicine. Now with health low and morale dropping you frantically launch another mission just to find the basic necessities, yet you never return.
If you make it to the final day, you'll have ten minutes to make final preparations. There isn't enough time to build more defenses so you better be ready. You place everyone where they should go, set there firing ranges, and pray that they do well. After you're ready hit the button and wait for the game to load again. Bam! Good luck, now's when you watch all your hard work pay off or go into the toilet. Whether you win or lose you'll feel an amazing sense of accomplishment. This is a game worth playing, now onto problems unfortunately.
Firstly the game is dated. It actually looks like an early PS2 title, and besides poor LOD and Draw Distance, models aren't that great looking wither. Combine that with poor animation and weak textures and you have one ugly (or at best, unpolished) game. The capability is there, but it needs beefed up. Unfortunately despite it's poor looks the game runs very poorly. This is no secret, on my usual rig the game was basically unplayable at parts. Everything lowest including rendering quality, was the only way to give the final battle semblance of smoothness. It would appear that the developers were aware of this and added the option to actually "speed up" the game when things get too thick. While the game actually runs faster it does make it playable. Just out of curiosity, I ran the game on one of my older computers (Dual Core, 3GB of RAM, and a 9800GT) and it actually ran better, go figure. I have a theory that it revolves around certain peoples hardware configurations, as my older pc received better framerates and various forumites have varying degrees of performance. The ideal rig seems to be a dual core, mixed with a fairly powerful video card. Moving to quad seemed to reduce performance slightly, and crossfire had no impact on the game's framerate.
Sound Design is terrible as well. All the zombies share one noise and even the female ones sound like males. Weapons are all similar basically a "POP" sound at varying pitches. There is no music in the game, and the little voice acting that exists is terrible. Bill Reilly says incredibly stupid stuff when being hit like "Ow! You mother-dude". The way he says it actually sounds like he was about to say mf-er but stopped himself and tried to insert something different, kinda like how, I imagine,you try to save face if you swore in front of your boss in the workplace. Ha!
There's another problem that should be noted, and that's pathfinding. Zombies cannot pathfind well and neither can other survivors for that matter. For zombies it's not much of a problem as they can climb up and over stuff. As for the other survivors, well I recommend that you leave them at base and go solo while on your missions. At least they aren't a problem in the final battle as they become much more intelligent for some reason (I believe Kerberos put more effort into the pathfinding at the actual forts than elsewhere).
Honestly though, problems aside, the reviews don't give this game enough credit.It has a unique and innovative formula backed up by solid controls and great combat. The actual management business is deep without being overwhelming, and aspects like the need to eat, and ammo conservation put the survival back into survival horror. There is a ton of genuine tension generated by the slow reloading and tight building interiors. Unfortunately the horrid performance, and poor production values really knock it down a few notches. For 10 dollars, it's worth it if you're patient, but be warned it may just not run well on your PC (new or old). If they could fix the performance issues, and optimize this fun game I would give it an eight easily, but until then it gets a six and a half, representing a good game dragged down by technical issues.