There are a number of things that set Lifeline apart from the previous

two iterations of the game.

The original game was story-based, with some missions needing to be

completed in a timely fashion. There was a definite progression of events,

culminating in an escape - of sorts - from Trumbull Valley. Breakdown, on

the other hand, is essentially open-ended. You can take all the time you

want to scavenge and scrounge, and missing out on a mission here or there

won't usually set you back much. Someone might get miffed at you, and you

lose some Influence, but it's usually not fatal, and there are no story

consequences. Because there's not really any story.

Not so with Lifeline. If you dick around too much trying to loot every

garage and camp site you come across, people die. And if too many of the

wrong people die, you fail, and have to start a new game. When people die

on you, it's usually disastrous - if you lose one of the civilians you are

trying to rescue, you get chewed out over NPR by Vienna Chow, the

left-wing nutjob who alternates between telling everyone how crappy the

military is for running away and then demanding that her radio-show

callers be rescued. If you lose too many of them, apparently she stops

taking calls, and you no longer get the option to rescue anybody. You

might not know whether to be happy or sad about that.

Losing military assets is even more catastrophic. Every soldier is needed

for the defense of the base (called "Black Friday") during sieges. And the

more sieges you endure, the worse they get. You are also tasked with

rescuing civilian doctors and scientists, and, in one case, the stoner son

of a restaurant chain owner who may agree to supply the military with his

fleet of food trucks. Lose any of those and command tears a strip off your

ass.

Ultimately, Danforth is a no-win situation. There are far too many

zombies and not nearly enough soldiers to contain or kill them all.

Greyhound One wasn't sent there to re-take the city; they were sent in to

extract anything of value, and then get out alive. It's an interesting

reversal of the previous two games, where the goal was to build bigger and

bigger fortifications, gather up as many survivors as possible, and keep

on keepin' on.

The sieges are a new mechanic, similar to but slightly different from the

sieges against neighboring enclaves in the previous iterations. You get a

"danger counter" on your minimap, and when it reaches stage 3, that means

it's siege time and you need to get your ass back to Black Friday. The

sieges are regular occurrences, and they are one of the bigger

resource-drains you will face - especially later in the game, when they

get longer and more difficult. The zombies come in two waves. The first

wave is usually fairly standard and nothing to get too upset about. The

second wave is the "oh shit" moment - that's when the Big 'Uns and Ferals

start coming out, after the first wave has already chewed through your

mines and weakened the gates. My usual strategy has been to save the

fireworks bombs and propane tanks for the second-wave assaults, since the

mines and our snipers can generally handle the first-wave assaults without

much fuss.

The second-wave assaults are also when you call in the artillery strikes

- another new feature, and one of the benefits of being a member of the

armed forces. For the first couple of sieges, when you are taking orders

from "the Doghouse," you have access to an array of artillery barrages -

incendiary, mortars, attack drones and others. Later on, when you are

forced to go a little higher up on the chain of command, you have to establish

outposts at artillery and comm stations around the city in order to gain

access to artillery strikes.

When the zeds break through the gates, they bee-line for the helipad

where your civilian evacuees are waiting. And if you let more than one or

two slip in, your evacuees are pretty much dead, and you get chewed out by

Vienna Chow and/or command.

Some players are claiming there are too many sieges, some that there are

not enough. The sieges can be an aggravating distraction when you're

trying to complete other objectives, but it can be equally aggravating

later on when you are waiting around at Black Friday for a siege to start

so you can get on with your work and advance the story. If you find the sieges

are happening too quickly, you can stretch them out a bit by ordering your

soldiers to "thin the herd" via the Ops Center at base. If you find they

are not happening often enough, make sure your soldiers are doing

something else.

The playable area of Danforth is not nearly as big as it looks on the

map. Much of it is occupied by the multi-lane highway encircling the

mostly-off-limits city core, and the rest is divided up into little

isolated neighborhoods connected only by the highway. Hopping the fences

around the edges of these neighborhoods is sometimes possible, but usually

a really bad idea. Most neighborhoods are ringed by "danger zones" where

the zombies are packed almost shoulder-to-shoulder and never stop

spawning. These can be useful if you can find a good sniping spot, have a

ton of ammo and want to improve your Shooting skill, but going in with a

pipe wrench and hoping to slug your way out is ill-advised.

I found that I spent a lot more time driving between missions in Lifeline

than I did in the other two iterations. There are no back-road shortcuts,

so I was always taking the Danforth Beltway and dodging pileups. This

isn't the most engaging gameplay, even with the cool new army trucks.

I also found that there were too many "Too Many Hordes" missions. You get

4 hordes for each of these missions, and it essentially involves driving

all the way around the Danforth Beltway and plowing into them with your

truck before they infest a house. Not doing these missions is almost the

same as doing them - there's little consequence for skipping them because

you're probably not going to be spending a lot of time worrying about infestations

or house-prowling anyway. I did them whenever time allowed, but they kept

popping up over and over, and eventually I got annoyed.

There are a lot more zombies in Danforth than there are in Trumbull

Valley. This can be a mixed blessing - it certainly makes the game more

challenging, but at some points it almost feels like punishment for

something. At one point, I was scouting the neighborhood on the other side

of the highway from Black Friday while the siege alert was at stage 2.

There had to have been 30 zombies shambling around on the short stretch of

street between the overpass and the T-intersection. Just on the street,

mind you - that wasn't counting the ones inside the office buildings and

the restaurant.

A number of players have expressed disappointment with the new Danforth map,

and a lot of the complaints focus on the fact that you never get to go

into the heart of the city. Basically, you're stuck in the boroughs, which

all look a lot like Marshall or downtown Spencer's Mill. If you're

expecting re-enactments of epic scenes from I Am Legend, or the Atlanta

moments from Season 1 of The Walking Dead, you're in for a let-down. The

playable areas of Danforth, connected by the expressway, make for a much

smaller game environment than Trumbull Valley.

Be aware that there are a few bugs and glitches still being worked out.

NPC AI is occasionally troublesome - soldiers may end up just standing

around during sieges instead of shooting or attacking zeds. And you will

probably get annoyed by civilians' utter inability to fight off attacking

zombies. They'll often cower when being attacked by even a single zombie

and won't try to fight them off. This can be problematic when you are

delayed during a rescue attempt - often, the rescue target is already

being swarmed by the time you get near, and if you have to fight off

another group on your way to the target's location (or if one of the

attackers is, say, a Feral), you'll probably end up trying to rescue a

heap of shredded guts surrounded by hungry zeds.