Jackto Studios is a game development studio hailing from South Korea consisting of only two developers. Their first game Night of The Dead was an instant hit when it launched into Early Access on Steam back in August 2020 and even hit the Steam top seller charts at the time, gathering a ‘very positive’ rating in the process and also managing to snag an ‘Epic MegaGrant” throughout the course of its development. Night of The Dead has now come out of Early Access on Steam and has gone into full release, and we put it through its paces.

Being a lover of survival games, especially ones that include zombies, I have avidly watched Night of The Dead through its development cycle. Night of the Dead, plunges players into a desperate struggle for survival against hordes of undead monstrosities in a post-apocalyptic world. Promising a blend of base-building, crafting, and relentless zombie action, the game aims to carve out its niche in the crowded survival horror genre, what sets the game apart from its peers in the survival game genre is that Night Of The Dead also incorporates elements of tower defence into its gameplay since every 24 hours in game a massive horde of zombies is going to come searching for you and your ramshackle base in the hopes of destroying it and possibly eating your brains in the process.

Night of The Dead features a fairly robust character customisation system, besides the obvious choice of being male or female you have a large number of options you can choose such as hairstyles, faces, and body types and these can be tweaked even further through the use of sliders. You also get to give your character a bit of a back story by choosing their previous occupation which also comes with different stat bonuses and you can further tweak your characters strength and weaknesses via a points based system, meaning every strength you choose such as having a cast iron stomach will cost you points but every weakness you have such as low cardio will add points back into you pool, Night of The Dead is not the first game to use this type of system but I really love when games take this approach as it really leads to a lot of diversity in the builds you can create for your character.

The game starts off with you waking up in what appears to be some secret underground facility that has recently had an outbreak of some kind that has turned its inhabitants to zombies, you get guided through the facility by various broadcasts via your radio and talking to NPCs, the radio is your main source of communication in the game, and serves as both a tutorial and the element that drives the story forward. As you explore your way around the abandoned facility you learn the games basic controls such as movement and how to search for items and even how to engage in combat, before you leave the base to explore the surface you will also pick up a follower that you can basically boss about and use to collect some of the games various resources for you to use and even help you during combat, very handy!

Once you hit the surface the game turns into pretty much every survival game you have played before, you gather resources (sticks, stone, twigs, logs, iron) and then turn these resources into tools in order to gather resources more efficiently and then use those resources to create workbenches and research benches so that you can create shelter, weapons, armour and traps so that you can survive in this harsh post-apocalyptic world, one great touch is that every tool or weapon you create has a chance to be upgraded into a higher tier than standard and therefore come with extra firepower or stats, this is something I have never seen in a survival game before and I think it’s a really innovative idea. There is also a food mechanic so you will need to ensure you keep your characters calories topped up either by food you scavenge from searching places or from hunting, from what I saw though hydration doesn’t seem to matter, though food does have the potential to go off if you take too long to consume it.

The game offers a vast array of weapons, traps, gadgets and building components you can construct, most of these are unlocked through a research tree which is surprisingly extensive. You unlock items on the research tree by using research data that you can find by scavenging through the many abandoned buildings in the game which will give you access to upgrades such as survival (gathering food and building related), skill (blacksmithing, weapons, cooking), combat (weapon related skills and healing), utility (unarmed combat, hunting, metabolism) and cell (boosts various resistances such as cold, lightning and explosions.) There is a lot to unlock and play around with which definitely helped with keeping me motivated to grind towards some of the more fun looking upgrades in the tech tree. The big difference between Night of The Dead and some of its competitors in the survival genre is the fact that every night the game switches from a survival game to more of a tower defence game as hordes of zombies will come and try to annihilate both you and your base, for me this was one of the most entertaining portions of the game as you see all your hard work from scavenging resources and building traps during the day time pay off as you slice, burn and explode zombies into oblivion with the defences you have built around your base. The tower defence component of the game is a really nice touch and definitely helps break free of the usual loop in survival games of gathering resources, building weapons and bases and killing rinse repeat, the fact that you know that a horde is going to descend upon your base every night adds a crazy amount of tension as the day draws on.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Night of The Dead, not everything is great. The games story is nothing to write home about and is basically delivered through snippets of radio chatter and readable snippets of text, there is not real plot or character development to speak of and I eventually just ended up tuning the story out and just doing what I wanted to do, in saying that though it’s great that a survival game actually offers a story that you can choose to partake in if you want to as a lot of other games in the same genre lack a story entirely. The combat is not very fun or engaging, both melee and gun combat feel loose and sloppy and offer virtually no feedback whether you are driving a weapon through a zombies skull or shooting them in the face, it is not very satisfying at all, in contrast to this setting up mazes full of traps and contraptions designed to take out the hordes of zombies at night is extremely satisfying so I suppose it depends on what you are looking for as far as combat goes.

Graphics and sound are nothing to write home about, but they are acceptable and more competently delivered than a lot of other games in the genre and the world itself is interesting to explore and encourages you to move out of the safer wilderness areas into the city as the that’s where the more valuable and rare loot is located. You also don’t have to go about everything solo and can join up with friends and play co-op or even join a dedicated server and play with other people and even experience PVP, unfortunately all of the servers I searched through seemed to be completely devoid of other players so I can’t tell you much about the multiplayer component of the game at all except to say that if you want to play multiplayer then it is probably best to have a couple of friends that want to join you or else you might end up on a multiplayer server that is deader than the zombies inhabiting it.

Night of The Dead is an amazing achievement for a game created by a two person studio with its standout feature being that is fuses tower defence style gameplay into a survival game, which should be a recipe for success. However, I am not sure if the added twist on what is mostly a stock standard survival game in a massively overcrowded genre is enough to overcome the games shortcomings, and I suspect that this may be the main reason for the games multiplayer community to be non-existent. Nothing is done terribly bad here but nothing is fantastically good either and with the price the developers are asking for the game being fairly high I can’t help but think this is what might be pushing a lot of players away from Night of The Dead and into the hands of the several cheaper zombie survival games that are available.