Rebuild – defend your community in this eerie & utterly compulsive survival strategy game!
by Paul Wilks
May 30, 2012 8:40 AM –
Install
Rebuild is an eerie, atmospheric and utterly compulsive turn-based survival strategy game by developer Sarah Northway. Set in a post-zombie-apocalyptic dystopia, Rebuild puts you in charge of defending and rebuilding a community of survivors. Explore, find survivors, feed your community, keep morale high and defend against regular zombie attacks. You have thought I’d have had enough of zombie titles by now, but I simply cannot put this game down…
Price: $2.99
Tested on: HTC One X
Content Rating: Medium Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Atmospheric music!
- Simple yet immersive gameplay!
- Great selection of characters!
- Massively addictive!
- Challenging and fun!
Cons
- I’d perhaps like to see a few more events/characters/decisions to make… maybe with future updates…
Features:
With May being officially being Zombie Awareness Month, what better way to celebrate than to embrace post-apocalyptic survival games? Zombie games are huge in the Google Play Store and we’ve certainly reviewed our fair share in the past, most recently Zynga’s ZombieSmash. Rebuild is an altogether different, and perhaps more serious, concern and places you as a leader in a small community surrounded by the merciless undead who attack in hordes.
After you have named your community, there are various practical requirements you need to consider. Food is perhaps the most vital and you can farm your own crops which brings in a daily yield, or scavenge for food outside the barriers which is more dangerous. The ultimate goal is to grow the community and reclaim surrounding blocks. To do this you need to scout the block, kill the zombies that exist there and reclaim the site by building fences around it. Utilising the space you have is also important. Churches and bars help keep morale high but you often need to acquire apartment blocks to house people, or turn a patch into farmland to grow crops. If you have a successful and well-run community people are more likely to join you- there are plenty of survivors and these can be of great benefit to the community.
There are numerous buildings to take over; supermarkets, police stations, apartment blocks, bars, churches, schools, farms and more. These all help the community maintain health, food, morale and residency. Perhaps the most important however are hospitals; if a member comes back from a mission injured you need them repaired and back to work as soon as possible.
Rebuild is a diverse game that you play day-by-day. Zombie hordes often attack at night, so you have to make sure you have enough community members to cope with their threat. It’s often wise to only send out a few members at a time, and very prudent to send more than one person to each block if you want them to come back in one piece. It’s filled with moral decisions and even the lower difficulty settings are a genuine challenge. You need to accumulate 30 blocks to complete the game, and there are seven different endings to discover.
The game is very atmospheric and engrossing. I found it quickly became one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played, and that’s saying a lot. It doesn’t patronise you by being too easy and you genuinely have the threat of zombie attacks every night. You somehow develop a fondness for characters in the game and feel genuinely sad if they die. It’s immersive, addictive and gives you a real emotional reaction that is pretty unrivalled. It’s also easy to play, brilliantly designed and a true time-killer. I’ve played this for what I thought was a short time, when a hour or more had passed by easily.
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Rebuild – City view
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Rebuild – Expand one block at a time
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Rebuild – Zombie attack
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Rebuild – Farms yield daily crops. They might be boring but are essential to your survival
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Rebuild – With morale low can you blame them?
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Rebuild – Crazy psychotic gangs are another thing to worry about
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Rebuild – Missions get cancelled for various reasons; injury and death being the most common
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Rebuild – Select members to carry out missions
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Rebuild – Setting the game up
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Rebuild – Settings
Fun Factor:
Rebuild is lots of fun. Gameplay is diverse and intriguing- requiring strategy and canny organisational skills. There’s reward in finding more survivors and claiming new blocks, as there is in surviving a zombie horde attack. The game is brutally compulsive and hugely enjoyable throughout.
Addictive:
Because the game is turn-based (gameplay is day-by-day) you forever have the option of ‘one more day’. This makes the make incredibly difficult to put down- especially if you are trying to reclaim an important building or improve morale. As addictive factor goes, this makes it extremely high.
Graphics:
The graphics essentially consist of aerial city views with regular memos and note-book style paperwork for you to control what’s going on. You need to choose who to send on missions, make decisions like whether to gamble some of your food supply for more, whether to allow members of the community to speak out on a range of topics and obviously which areas to explore; prioritising things like food and shelter. The graphics then are essentially still images rather than anything spectacular, but this works perfectly with the game and looks very well designed and is slickly animated.
Accelerometer, Vibration & Sound:
The sound is immense. It is genuinely haunting, much like the musical score in films like 28 Days Later. It’s bleak, dystopian and utterly perfect for the game.