You are going to die. Repeatedly.

Ah, zombies. Everyone in video games loves to use these lovable fellows as the enemies for their heroes to shoot, maim, blow-up, and destroy in any means possible. The thing is, these ravening hordes never seem to win, or if they do, you just load from the last save point. In die2nite, the story is much different. The zombies are going to win, you just have to survive for as long as possible.

When you first start the game, you are thrown into a small town with 39 other players. You have up to 24 hours (depending on when you join) to scavenge for materials and build up defenses for the night. At 11pm game time (even though its called the Midnight Attack) , a horde attacks the city. If you town’s defenses are good enough (and someone remembered to close the gates in time), the horde is fought off for the night. If not, it becomes fighting in the streets, as zombies try to fit their way through the cots and tents to eat the townspeople. You can build defenses in your “house” to help defend against zombies inside the walls, but you can’t defend against many on your own.

This process continues until you die from the zombies or one of the other many ways. Then the process begins all over again.

This game is very good at giving the townsmembers many ways to either protect themselves or screw themselves over. After a while you begin to see the pattern of which buildings are the best, and what items are useless, and you begin to survive for longer and longer (assuming you don’t see the trolls I’ll talk about in a bit). Once you get over 100 soul points (gained by surviving nights in the town), you get access to towns which can only be played in if you are over 100 SP, so you have to deal with fewer newbies and trolls.

Unfortunetly, there is a sizable community of trolls in this game. People who open the gates minutes before the attack, people who take important items out into the desert and let themselves get eaten by the zombies, people who build useless buildings to use up resources, etc. To make these matters worse, the staff just point to the skimpy player retaliation items when asked to deal with the trolls. Sure, you can “shun” the person to stop them from working on the construction site and drinking all the water, but there is still a lot they can do. Oh, and heaven forbid you get a bunch of trolls in one town. Then all the shunned people can turn the tables and shun the regular players and be no longer shunned themselves!

Overall, the game is very good, except for when you run into someone who gets their jollies by messing with other people.

Rating: (4 stars)