Infection Free Zone is a zombie apocalypse colony manager that will see you building fortifications, reclaiming lost buildings, and protecting your survivors against the hordes of the undead—with a special, personal twist. By far, the most interesting feature of Infection Free Zone is how the game manages to bring your actual location into play.
I’m not sure how, but Infection Free Zone seems to use Google Maps and satellite data to create maps based on real-world locations. That means you can play the game using any real-world place as a location. It also means you can literally find your own address and use your real-world home as your survivor’s base of operations. The game renders local businesses and buildings and even lists their names for you to recognize.
Now, the process of generating maps isn’t totally perfect. The map generated based on my address had a lot of extra roads and listed my local mall as a Panda Express. It is nonetheless eerily accurate to where I live, and I could recognize the names of local establishments, which added a serious personal connection to the game.
Some areas, notably the recommended starting locations, render more accurately than others. As cool as playing in a crude facsimile of my local area would be, I decided to take my first playthrough to Atlanta since I’m a big Walking Dead fan, and it seemed to be better put together. After getting absolutely destroyed a few times there, I generated a map based on my old, more rural house, which shockingly came out nearly identical to the real-world location, much better than my current city abode.
Generally, it would seem that the more updated the Google Maps data on a location is, the better it renders. I don’t know what caused my first attempt to render so poorly, but I didn’t see any strange extra roads or giant Panda Express locations anywhere else.
![Infection Free Zone Myhouse](https://tryhardguides.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Infection-Free-Zone-myhouse.jpg)
The localization is really impressive. I haven’t tested every single location in the world, obviously. Still, in the places I have selected as my starting location—Mesa, Arizona, Atlanta, Georgia, Italy, Japan, Germany—not only are the maps generated shockingly accurate, but the names of my survivors have been changed to fit the local cultures as well.
Moving past the interesting geolocation feature, Infection Free Zone is a fairly interesting, albeit not too complicated, colony management game. It reminds me of some old flash games I played back in the day, also set in the zombie apocalypse. You scavenge and slowly reclaim nearby buildings to shelter and feed your growing population of survivors. Your civilian population is split between squads and your workforce, the former doing the physical interaction with the map and the latter researching, building, harvesting resources, etc.
The game captures both the experience of managing a commune of survivors and the excitement of being a small team out on the road in a zombie apocalypse. While navigating the map with a group of survivors doesn’t have an incredible amount of mechanical depth, it’s still satisfying to slowly explore the entirety of a city and upgrade your squad with better gear as you do.
Unfortunately, some current design choices hold the game back from its full potential.
The game commits what is, in my opinion, the cardinal sin of city builders: Gates and towers do not snap to walls. This means you must build your gates and tower defenses first and then attach your walls afterward. This might sound like a small thing, but when you’ve played as many city builders as I have, you begin to notice the difference between games that remember to do this and games that don’t, and it is a big one.
Building, in general, could use a big expansion. As it exists now, you’re really just converting existing buildings into areas for your citizens to live in and then building walls and miscellaneous structures like radio towers around them. I guess this sort of fits the zombie apocalypse setting, but I’d like to see it change so that we have more to build.
![Infection Free Zone Base Defense](https://tryhardguides.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Infection-Free-Zone-base-defense.jpg)
An exceptionally odd design choice is that should you fail to protect your Zone and get a game over, your only options are to send feedback to the developers or exit the game. Completely. Clicking this option does not return you to the main menu; instead, it totally closes the game and returns you to your desktop. A reload your save option or the ability to return to the menu without relaunching the game is needed here before the game launches.
The game’s tutorial, which will play every new game if you don’t turn it off, is exceptionally interruptive, something I complain a lot about in my reviews. Every time you receive a message on your radio device (thing?), the game will pause, lock you out of whatever you were doing, and force you to listen to the incoming message. You can’t skip it; you only speed it up. Oftentimes, these messages don’t require any action on your part and are more or less flavorful text.
![Infection Free Zone Looting](https://tryhardguides.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Infection-Free-Zone-looting.jpg)
Finally, I have to say that a disappointingly linear design sort of limits what could have been one of the most infinitely replayable games out there. Certain events will always happen when you start a new game; You will always find seeds and an assault rifle near your HQ, you will always find a distressed smoke signal early on, and you’ll always stumble on a car within walking distance of your HQ. Ditching these guaranteed starts and adding a larger variety of random events could make Infected Free Zone one of the best, or at least one of the most replayable, open-world survival games out there.
Pros
- Interesting and undeniably exciting map generation system that allows you to play the game in an accurate reaction of just about anywhere in the world
- Great immersion due to the great localization of the map generation mechanic
- Solid, if a bit unrefined, city-building mechanics
Cons
- A lack of unpredictability kills some of the replayability
- Frustrating gameplay choices or poorly designed mechanics can make some aspects of the game feel a bit tedious