Can you survive Deadly Days?
Deadly Days is a unique strategic rogue-lite in the zombie apocalypse. Manage and protect a group of survivors and help them to stop the catastrophe. Discover and use a large number of wild and crazy objects, even wilder and crazier survivors, special abilities, and deadly weapons.
Deadly Days makes you pick between areas to scavenge with survivors for a small time before having to evacuate as after the limit, the zombies keep raising in level and can overwhelm your team. These areas can hold anything like food and resources to weapons and new survivors. You’ll need an apple a day for each survivor, but they can also level them up so finding the right balance is essential.
You have a base you go back to at the end of each day and can level up your survivors, scrap unwanted weapons and spend loot on special and base skills that will act as perks for your team. The map is always covered a fog of war and each level seems to be randomly generated, which obviously adds to the overall difficulty. Also, zombies have their own level of difficulty that goes up every few days, but there are things that can lower that like raiding the fire department or building a room in your base that lowers the level by 1 every 3 days.
You also get to drop airstrikes on zombies every few seconds, but you can also hurt your team doing this if you’re not careful. There are two different ways to “finish” the game, the first is to gather 4 map pieces to a burger factory and take on different rooms till you get an end-boss then escape. The second is to gather enough resources to build a rocket and then collect enough rocket parts to escape. Both ways are incredibly tough to pull off, especially given the rogue-lite nature of the game and having to balance resources that could be the difference between victory and defeat.
The random nature of drops and levels can mean that you may not even get opportunities to get map pieces for a long time, so making sure you keep gathering enough food and resources is essential till you do. If you manage to complete a run in one way then I recommend doing the other for the added challenge, plus there are different end-game bosses in the factory and it seems random which you get. Trophy hunters will have a challenge getting the Platinum on this one, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility…you’ll just need a lot of good luck coming your way.
The visual style is a 2D pixelated one that is charming in its own way. It’s simplistic, but it works and it has no problems with framerate unless you pause the game to scope out the map, which for some reason causes a few hiccups with it.
The Verdict
Deadly Days is an interesting take on the rogue-lite genre by combining it with a survival/strategic twist. I honestly didn’t expect to get so hooked on it, but it’s one of those clever games that I’ll keep coming back to for quite some time.