Rebuild 2 – Rebuild Your City After the Zombie Apocalypse

This is the overhead view you'll be using most of the time. The goal is to recover areas on the map to provide services for your citizens until you can find the City Hall and draft a Constitution.

I just stumbled across this little gem on NewGrounds, Rebuild 2, where you’re tasked with rebuilding your post-zombie apocalypse city by expanding its borders to surrounding buildings, eventually acquiring the City Hall and drafting a constitution to win the game.  There is quite a bit more depth to it than just that, though.

You will begin with a small team of people with minimal skills.  Over time, their soldier, leadership, and building skills will increase, allowing you to more easily slay the undead, convince people to join your group, and reclaim areas.  You will be able to recruit more survivors as you clear more areas of the map, but sometimes they aren’t all that excited to see you.  Having a higher leadership skill will increase the chance that you’ll be able to recruit these paranoid people and add them to your ranks.

You have the option of scouting a building before you go in and clear the zombies from it then reclaim the building itself.  Each of these requires a set number of game days to accomplish, however, increasing certain skills and/or having multiple team members participate can reduce the required time it takes to accomplish the task.  There are different types of properties which provide certain in-game services for your survivors, as well.

This is the zombie raid screen. Make sure you've got someone at home when this goes down!

Churches add happiness once you instruct someone to work there.  Hospitals take care of the sick.  Farms feed people (this is important, I found that out the hard way).  Pubs provide happiness.  Malls can be fortified to increase your defenses against zombie raids.  Laboratories allow you to research things to make killing easier, allow farms to produce more food, and signalling so you can more easily recruit survivors.  This game mechanic is pretty well integrated as it’s necessary to be successful, but the different buildings/functions aren’t overwhelming.  You can also turn certain properties that serve no other purpose into one of the buildings that will serve you well.

At seemingly random times, you will be plagued with a horde of zombies.  The game will warn you about particularly large herds so you can keep people at home to defend, but there are times where you’ll be blindsided.  This never gave me much trouble… actually, it never even posed a threat.  I kind of wish this was more threatening, to be honest.  You may also be plagued with roving bands of bandits who will steal food and injure or kill your citizens.

There are certain other random things that happen, as well.  You’ll meet zombie sympathizers, wacky scientists who’ll overtake a laboratory for some “secret experiment” (I never did find out what that was about… if you do, let me know), a roving merchant who tries to trade certain items with you (be careful about your choices on him, sometimes… if it asks “We need X, don’t we?”, make sure you want X instead of Y… say no to X if it’s not the one you want!

I had a ton of fun in the hour and a half it took me to win the game.  I took a bit longer than was necessary because I actually recovered the entire map, which was unnecessary.  Once you reclaim the City Hall, you can begin the process of drafting a constitution.  This process takes 10 days and you will be notified of conflicts between the drafters, which you choose when you initiate the process, though it doesn’t seem like you can do much about those conflicts.

I’m a fan.  Go play it.