Endzone 2 early access review: Rebuild humanity as a post-apocalyptic plate-spinning machine

Sometimes you forget to build a graveyard. It happens. When ten citizens fell dead on the roads of one of my settlements in the post-apocalyptic city-building game Endzone 2, I had to work fast to prevent a disease from breaking out. But graveyards require a lot of space, and if you’ve filled your shantytown with corrugated metal roofs, that’s a problem. Welcome to the delightful headache of urban planning in a post-nuclear world where most of the land is brown and uninhabitable.

Endzone 2 ticks many boxes when it comes to building games, despite its small side hustle of CRPG-style scenery exploration (more on that in a moment). You play a group of underground survivors who have repopulated the surface. But the fiery soil dictates your use of space with little red squares like swamps, mountains, lakes, or wastelands that refuse to comply with your desire for more housing or a market in an otherwise perfect spot. The resulting towns often feel organic and real, rather than the endless rows of apartments or perfectly round suburbs that other building games might allow.

Watch on YouTube

There are many types of buildings to place, and many workers to employ. Tiny invisible fishermen will add to your food supply, while tiny invisible weavers will increase your fabric stash. Many buildings get bonuses for being near others of a certain type. A coal mine near a lumberjack's hut, for example. A storage depot near anything. But sometimes you have to put things together in strange ways, so you usually have to abandon your hopes for perfect output. That's the quiet charm of the game, I think. It's about efficiency, certainly, about clicking buttons back and forth on a machine. But this is a machine that doesn't always want to adapt to you. It's like, “Look, that's how things work in the dead lands, deal with it.”

There are seasonal moments of danger that require you to stock up for tough times. Droughts cause lakes to completely disappear and your water supply to quickly run out. Toxic rain requires protective gear, or your borderlands will get radiation sickness. It definitely subscribes to the “ant and grasshopper” school of construction games, where the tension comes from wanting to expand while also storing up bags of food for subsequent crises (hello Banished, hello Northgard, hello Timberborn). So there's a bit of a lingering threat. But beyond that tension, I found it all strangely comforting.

A scout vehicle drops off a researcher to investigate a roadside house.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Combine Fun

Perhaps that’s because you can leave the workshops running and go on a road trip whenever you want. A toy-like truck provides the side job in Endzone 2’s scavenger adventures. You steer the truck through the cracked roads of a garbage future and loot various relics for extra resources. Some locations allow your drivers to jump out of the vehicle and explore the environment, interacting with objects from an isometric perspective, almost CRPG-style. Find an axe and pry open some doors. Discover a book that will help you identify plants, thus unlocking new seeds for farming. Blowtorch open a shipping container and extract all the iron ingots inside like a child in a yellow raincoat exposed to radiation cracking open a long-lost Kinder egg.

This is also how you progress through the game's research tree. By exploring these urban dives and roadside dumps (sometimes quite far from your settlement), you earn “knowledge points” that let you progress through a traditional tech tree consisting of mines, water treatment plants, bathhouses, crematoriums, and many upgraded versions of buildings you already own.

It's a welcome distraction, and tying it into the research tree makes it feel important to take a trip every now and then. However, Endzone 2 is first and foremost a game of controlling the green arrows and distracting the red arrows with clever metering adjustments and on-the-fly construction projects. This becomes clear when you use the same little scout truck to establish brand new settlements on the same big map, at which point the plate-spinning begins in earnest.

A lakeside village is established in a fertile area of ​​barren land.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Combine Fun

Each small patch of green and habitable land you explore will have its own strengths and weaknesses. One settlement might have plenty of fresh water from multiple lakes, which is great for developing a cloth industry. Another will be in a swamp, which is great for making medicinal herbs. Another might have an iron vein or an iodine mine, which can be used as capital. Since each village on your larger map will specialise in these particular goods, you'll then need to establish transport links, again using road trip vans as small trucks, shuttling back and forth between your towns with their boots full of syringes, rubber gloves, clay bricks or gas masks.

Over time, a small network of goods will begin to form. Interconnected production chains emerge, and you can start trying to optimize things. Workshops will produce tools faster if there’s a scrapyard and a lumberjack’s hut nearby to provide supplies, and fishermen will harvest more seafood when these toolmaking workshops are placed nearby. It’s a pretty standard base-building process of creating multiple towns with cross-logistical needs. The challenge is placing these buildings when the terrain doesn’t allow for perfect efficiency, or when haphazard decisions you’ve made before create a sprawling mess that makes new building placement its own puzzle. Guys, really need a cemetery?

When a sudden drought or wave of disease sweeps across the landscape and threatens the stability of your provincial havens, you'll have to micromanage import-export routes, ensuring that Grimdork Lakes receives enough medicine from other towns or that Garbageville (yes, you can rename your settlements) receives plenty of water. When toxic storms hit, a small Geiger meter shows how much radiation your settlers have been exposed to. You'll also need to keep an eye on the soil, as it too can be poisoned by radiation.

The superimposed map clearly shows the geographical features of the land, such as mountain ranges and lakes.

A person walks on top of a ruined wind turbine and looks out over the dim landscape.

A lakeside village is established in a fertile area of ​​barren land.

As smoke rose from the chimneys of buildings, the arid lands were parched.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Combine Fun

If Geiger’s voice doesn’t bother you, the shaky voiceover might. The music also feels very placeholder. While the synthwave music isn’t off-putting on its own, it doesn’t mesh well with the art style or plot. It’s the kind of music you hear in sci-fi space games, with an almost robotic rhythm that would fit if this were a base-building game set in a gleaming cyberpunk urban ruin. But it creates an oddly atmospheric clash with the rustic backdrops and overgrown cottages. I turned the volume of this music down to 0% and turned on a “relaxing guitar” playlist instead. It works a little better.

I have other reservations. For a game about efficiency and production chains, there's sometimes unnecessary friction. The long loading times when resuming your save file will hopefully be fixed in early access. As for the rest, I don't know. An apothecary and a pharmacy, for example, are two different buildings you can create – one to produce medicine, the other to distribute it. Not only do the similar names create confusion, they also feel like overkill in a society that inherently has to cut corners. Can't one building do both?

There are other restrictive quirks. For example, since each settlement has its own resource pool, you'll have to cycle through towns, unlocking the research tree in each one before you find the settlement with enough iron or glass or something to press the “research” button on a particular piece of technology. It also means that sometimes you'll have to transfer a handful of clay, medicine, or clothing to the exact location you need just to press a button, while your logistics brain is busy screaming “I already have everything I need!”

A city in ruins as a Pathfinder truck passes by.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Combine Fun

This is why research and skill trees in games often work with their own separate currencies, generally speaking — it protects them from such problems. But Endzone 2’s research tree requires not just knowledge points, but also worldly goods. This makes it more deeply rooted in your production and transportation networks, yes, but it also makes for some unintuitive moments. Sometimes, it’s just a slow game, even on the fastest forward setting.

For those who prefer the logistical fine-tuning to be more abstract and streamlined, this won’t rip you off the factory lines of Shapez 2. But for those who prefer the numbers game wrapped in a thematic purpose, it might be worth a shot. It doesn’t have the moral compass or defined atmosphere of Frostpunk (which, for me, remains the more remarkable post-apocalyptic city-builder). But with its humble scavengers and rescue missions, it at least does enough to keep you invested in the community as a whole. Even if that concern is always subordinated to a selfish desire to keep resources from running low.

“Oh my God, the people of Bogbottom are being lashed with acid rain again,” you'll say to yourself. “This is going to slow down vaccine production.” You'd better start digging now, those bodies aren't going to bury themselves.

Leave a Comment