Welcome to Mars! Here’s a surprise for you: Zombies! The Martian settlers in MarZ: Tactical Base Defense probably didn’t expect their new home to be overrun by brain-munching undead.
Apparently, some long-forgotten Soviet installation spawned all those zombies. Now, it is your job to clean up the red planet and ensure your settlers’ well-being. MarZ: Tactical Base Defense is essentially a tower defense game with a slight RTS slant and a few clever twists up its sleeve.
Each of your towers and other buildings, all of which can be placed freely on the big maps, have to be operated by personnel. However, you only have a limited number of troops on the ground. This means that you have to send your squishy little people scurrying around at times. That’s dangerous! Requesting backup soldiers is possible, but takes a while. Each soldier lost is a huge blow to your operation.
The odds are firmly stacked against you. There are thousands of zombies shambling around out there. One mistake – one tactical error – could spell disaster. Perfection is rewarded with unlockable traits that make your life a little easier. Alternatively, they add some fun stuff, such as the ability to enter any tower and shoot in first person, to the game.
The game has spent a fair while in early access, and most of that time has been spent fine-tuning its difficulty. Playing earlier versions could feel like running into a brick wall, repeatedly. Thankfully, player feedback led developers DoorFortyFour to add an easier difficulty, and now everything feels just right. It still offers plenty of challenge, especially if you’re after the unlockable stuff.
This is not all that has changed, mind you. A skirmish mode, accompanied by a nifty looking map editor, lets you tinker around with the game’s stats and variables. Creating your own Martian zombie apocalypse sounds fun, right? Additionally, the new outbreak mode does away with the wave-based gameplay and sends those nasty undead at you all at once. This shakes up the whole game dynamic.
MarZ: Tactical Base Defense is built on a solid gameplay foundation. It offers more than enough new ideas to be worth a look for fans of the genre. The extra time in early access really paid off, and the game now offers well-balanced, messy fun.
MarZ: Tactical Base Defense is available now on Steam.