Dead Age 2: The Zombie Survival RPG

The pitch, and the pedigree

Dead Age 2 puts a small band of survivors in your hands during a zombie apocalypse and asks you to keep them fed, armed and alive across two interleaving loops: a day-to-day camp you manage from a top-down base screen, and turn-based squad combat when you send people out to scavenge, fight and recruit. The store page names its influences directly — Darkest Dungeon, Fallout 1 and 2, This War of Mine, The Walking Dead — and that's an honest summary of the genre it's chasing: grim resource triage layered under tactical, permadeath-adjacent combat. It's a sequel to 2016's Dead Age, developed by the same studio, Silent Dreams, and published by Headup, and it fully released on 12 March 2021 after a period in Early Access.

That lineage matters for how this review reads the game, because the original Dead Age is still sitting on Steam with a Very Positive score across nearly 2,000 reviews — a strong showing for a budget indie survival RPG. The sequel, four and a half years and a much bigger scope later, sits at Mostly Positive across 426 reviews, a meaningfully lower bar for a game with a bigger budget and more systems. That gap is the story of this review: Dead Age 2 is a more ambitious game than its predecessor, and ambition is exactly where it starts losing people.

Two loops: the camp, and the field

The camp side is where Dead Age 2 is most confident. Every return to base means allocating scarce food and water, deciding how much to invest in defences versus sending crew out again, and choosing who gets outfitted with the best gear before the next expedition. Reviewers who like the game consistently point to this layer first: it's a real trade-off system, not a menu you clear once and forget, and it's the clearest through-line from the This War of Mine influence the store page names. One reviewer summed up the appeal plainly: "I like the tactical combat, the equipment system, the upgrade system, the resource management, the base management, and the story."

The field side is turn-based combat against zombies and hostile survivors, with a perk and "medal" upgrade system that persists progress across runs — every failure banks something toward the next attempt, in the Darkest Dungeon tradition of productive death. Visibly equipped gear on your survivors, an improved UI, and sharper art over the 2016 original are changes reviewers who played both games call out specifically as real upgrades, not cosmetic ones.

Where the wheels come off

The single most repeated complaint in Dead Age 2's negative reviews is the frequency of random encounters. Multiple reviewers describe exploration being interrupted by fights often enough that what should be a tense, considered survival loop turns into repetitive combat for its own sake: "There's too many enemy encounters. It's fine at first... but it gets very time consuming and mind numbing. Rinse & repeat," reads one representative review with 23 upvotes. Another, with 24 upvotes, put it more bluntly: "The combat gets tedious after a while. And the vast majority of the game is combat... This should be 10hrs but instead somehow I have 20+ hrs on record and I never finished the game."

A second, related complaint is difficulty that several reviewers describe as unfair rather than tense — zombie critical hits against full-health party members, and ranged zombie attacks that undercut the tactical positioning the combat otherwise asks for. This isn't every reviewer's experience; plenty of positive reviews describe the combat as the game's strong point. But it's a consistent enough thread across the negative side that it reads as a real design tension, not noise.

Story and endings

Dead Age 2's narrative branches on player choice, with multiple distinct endings rather than one fixed outcome, and several reviewers praise the writing for taking its bleak premise seriously without becoming self-important. Others land the opposite way, criticising the tone, pacing and translation quality; one negative review specifically calls out the writing as a low point "from the very start." As with the difficulty complaints, this looks like a genuine split in reception rather than a one-sided problem — but for a game explicitly chasing the storytelling weight of This War of Mine and Fallout, a divided response on writing is a real cost.

What the achievement data shows

Steam's own completion data lines up with the "runs out of steam" pattern in the reviews. Across 117 achievements, only five sit above 50% completion — mostly first-time milestones like the first kill (83.2%) and first zombie fight cleared (81.1%). From there the numbers fall fast: the median across all 117 achievements is 25.6%, and the achievements tied to actually finishing a run — hardcore-mode completion, specific story endings — sit between 2% and 4%. That's not proof any individual player quit for the reasons the negative reviews describe, but it corroborates the shape of the complaint: most buyers who start Dead Age 2 do not see it through to an ending.

Value and verdict

At NZ$26.29 with no in-app purchases of any kind, Dead Age 2's monetisation is as clean as indie RPGs get — the only cost is the up-front price. The question is how many hours of genuine engagement that buys, and the honest answer, per the achievement curve and the review text, is "the opening stretch, reliably, and the whole thing for a smaller share of buyers." Dead Age 2 is a real, ambitious sequel with a camp-management layer worth playing for on its own, wrapped around combat that a large share of its own audience found repetitive well before the credits. Go in for the base-building and the tactical opening hours, know that the encounter-rate complaints are common rather than rare, and treat a discount as the right entry point rather than full price.