We’ve all done it. Whether we’re at school, at work, in a waiting room, in a meeting, we’ve all sat there and wondered ‘if the zombie apocalypse started right now, where would I go?’ How many times have you mentally built and prepared the defenses in your own apartment block, or internally made a list of the best local stores to plunder for supplies? It’s the greatest thought experiment in the world – if zombies came crashing through the window now, what would you do? With shades of Cities Skylines 2, a big chunk of Frostpunk, and of course some Dying Light, a new survival game lets you live out this macabre fantasy in real time, and unsurprisingly, just one day after launch, it’s already blowing up on Steam.
This is Infection Free Zone, a new building and survival game with zombies. Gather resources, find weapons, build defenses, stay alive – it ticks all the boxes, and so far probably sounds like a variation on Project Zomboid, Dying Light 2, or State of Decay. But Infection Free Zone has an incredibly smart twist. Using real-world map and commerce data, it can create an approximation of basically any area in the world.
When you start the game, you pick your location – let’s say your hometown – and then Infection Free Zone builds a map based on actual GPS, Google Maps, and other geographical information. Put simply, if you ever thought your local CVS might be a good place to gather supplies and make a fortification, now you can put that to the test.
Protect your school. Barricade your apartment block. Rescue survivors from the local Wendy’s. It’s still early days for Infection Free Zone, and the maps are a little generalized and not entirely accurate – a shopping mall for example might be rendered as just one giant, single store, and as such only contain one type of supplies. But this is a hugely ambitious, visionary idea that is already working pretty well given the game just launched into early access.
And it’s paying off. In less than a day, Infection Free Zone has hit a high of some 10,000 concurrent players on Steam, while attracting an admirable ‘mostly positive’ rating, based on more than 500 user reviews. If you want to get in on the ground floor, Infection Free Zone is available right now, right here.
Alternatively, get the other best zombie games, or maybe the best building games available on PC.
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