I'm really starting to like what Deadly Days is turning into. It's an Early Access game about directing a group of survivors through a Zombie apocalypse and it's really taking shape now.

I've tested this one on and off since sometime around March last year, back then it was nothing but a shell. An interesting idea but it didn't really go anywhere. Pixelsplit now seem to have firmly found their feet, with each update making parts of the game make more sense, become bigger and more interesting. It's now actually more of a survival game and not just a town exploration game with zombies.

The basic loop of the game is that you equip your people with items, sort out your special powers like healing or dropping a bomb, pick a mission, explore and loot while taking down some zombies and then repeat. You need to find pieces of a map, to be able to complete a final mission. As you play, you gain XP and when you inevitably lose you will then gain unlocks for you next run. A sweet idea I had always hoped would really expand like this.

With the latest update your group will now need food to survive, one piece of food per-survivor each night. This makes the actual looting element to the game have a bit more of a point to it, other than finding new equipment. It makes your choices on where to go looting more important too. Not just that, the actual missions are now varied too:

When actually on a mission, it feels much more like a fast-paced strategy game now too. Actually directing your people is now a breeze, with simple mouse clicks to tell them where to go. So you drag the mouse around and they follow, or click to send them somewhere. It's much improved, it feels like it's supposed to now, like you're actually playing a game where you have some kind of control instead of just watching them do their own thing so it's more interesting to play.

They also added in special zombie variants, rare hard missions with good loot, additional dangers on maps to be on the lookout for when exploring, each character has a random trait that improves as they level up, vending machines to loot, zombies no actually have a basic attack animation and so on.

Their level of support with it on Linux has impressed me too. Within minutes of me letting them know it wasn't running correctly with this update, they added me on Steam to talk about it. Not long later the issue was found and now the fix is up. Good stuff!

You can find Deadly Days on Steam in Early Access.