Dead Season Review: XCOM meets Left 4 Dead

Just in time for the spooky season!

I’m a simple man with simple pleasures, and quite a few of those have to do with horror. October is my favourite time of the year — film, TV, and games all tap into the spooky season and provide me with a terrifying smorgasbord of stuff to watch and play. Dead Season is just one more game to add to that pile, a zombie apocalypse turn-based tactics title that’s equal parts XCOM and Left 4 Dead.

Dead Season places you in command of four reluctant heroes, working together through sixteen different levels in an attempt to survive the horde. Your objectives depend on the level — the tutorial mission is simply to get to a goal area, while later levels will have you barricading and cleaning out a building, or working with other survivors to trade gear and intel.

The setup is clearly inspired by Left 4 Dead — four survivors against the undead, and with increasingly difficult special zombies spawning in as you progress — and is framed by gameplay straight from XCOM. Your characters have a very finite amount of Action Points (AP) they can use in a single turn.

You’ll spend those AP by repositioning yourself on a map, scavenging caches, combining items like an oil filter silencer and a handgun, or even throwing items to a nearby survivor. You’ll also, of course, use your AP in combat.

Combat is both firearm- and melee-driven, with each having some pros and some cons. Melee weapons require close-quarters, and one particularly annoying zombie type expunges poisonous gas when they’re felled. Getting too close there is a recipe for disaster.

On the other hand, firearms are quite noisy without a silencer — going crazy with a shotgun, handgun, or assault rifle will raise the rage meter of the zombies around you, making them more aggressive than usual. Firearms are also prone to jamming and — in true turn-based tactics style — you’ll find your survivors occasionally whiff on a pristine chance for a shot.

Perks help in that regard; awarded through a level-based progression system, you’ll be able to activate perks that let you bank AP from turn to turn, or reduce the likelihood of a jam. While the general perk bank is the same for all characters, you can apply different combinations of perks based on their strengths. One character, Holly, is a cop and comes complete with a handgun; it therefore makes sense to load her up with complimentary perks.

I also recommend giving Holly gun-based perks above others as Dead Season likes to play with your emotions between levels. I’d frequently spend time scavenging and was rewarded with good loot — chainsaws, rifles, and more — only to find that those items would be the ones I’d lose to chance between missions. I get that an apocalypse is tough, but losing items like that was pretty demoralising.

Missions can last anywhere between 20-40 minutes depending on how you play; even more if, like me, you’re a bit shite at tactics games and basically need one round to see what’s going on before you take a second go to do it properly. While some feel like genuine puzzles — how efficient can you move here, or collect this — others just feel like you need to cross your fingers and go for the bum-rush.

All up, Dead Season is a fun mix of genres provided they’re in your wheelhouse. I very much enjoyed plunking away at a mission or two between titles like Until Dawn and Silent Hill 2 — again, all perfectly timed for the spooky season.

Priced at $20 USD (plus a 20% launch discount), this one’s a no-brainer if you’re square in the intersection of a Venn diagram detailing love for zombies and love for XCOM. It’s even more impressive as developer Snail Bite is comprised of just a single soul, Pavel Kharev.

Dead Season is out now on Windows PC via Steam.

Dead Season was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC via Steam, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.