A post-apocalyptic survival in the palm of your hand, here's the review of LifeAfter: Night Falls
The genre of survival with a post-apocalyptic setting and realistic setting has now been thoroughly explored in the videogame landscape, but it is still little used on mobile platforms, mainly due to technical limitations. Also for this reason, in this review of LifeAfter: Night Falls, we find ourselves appreciating the relative novelty of a game of this type that seems to carry weight from the PC environment to the mobile one, with good results. It is, moreover, a concept common to various smartphone productions by Chinese developers and publishers (NetEease, in this case), which tend to conceive the mobile platform as a sort of portable micro-PC, with positive elements and negatives that can derive from such an approach.
As for the former, such an ambitious approach leads to the introduction of types of games that were not previously found in the mobile scenario, often with considerable technical results, but the intrinsic flaws that derive from these solutions are often linked to usability, with rhythms game, interfaces and control systems that are not suitable for use on small screens. In most cases, such titles are paradoxically played more willingly on PC emulators than on the platforms they would have been designed for. LifeAfter: Night Falls fits into this vision quite precisely, although it does not lack a certain originality in certain game solutions, which is rather valuable in this area. It is a survival in which we create a character and his dog and then we try to keep them alive in a vast explorable world full of threats of various kinds (zombies and mutant creatures), with the need to fight, collect resources , build a shelter and possibly collaborate with other survivors.
Gameplay: a mix of elements
There are several suggestions that emerge playing LifeAfter: Night Falls, given the mix of elements that make up its gameplay, including exploration, combat, crafting and social dynamics. The idea that comes closest could be that of a State of Decay with greater emphasis on crafting, given the need to balance the sorties alone with attention to the management of a shared shelter, in this case with the collaboration of others human players. The goal is the reconstruction of some humanity after the spread of the zombie epidemic, so the actions are not aimed solely at the survival of the individual but also at the construction and maintenance of a sort of micro-society. In this sense the mechanics of the game are set, which alternates fights and crafting, search for resources around the world and more or less organized and demanding events to obtain useful loot both to strengthen the character and to improve the base. The control system with virtual stick on touchscreen carries with it the inherent flaws of this solution, even if it must be said that it is rather reactive beyond the lag that can emerge from the connection to the server.
The fights are a bit cumbersome and not very dynamic due to the control system, but they are based on the use of a wide range of weapons and take place on creatures even different from the standard zombies, as in the events against more powerful creatures, therefore there is also a certain variety of game situations. The graphics are remarkable, staging a large and detailed world, with different settings and a good representation of the character models, even if all this wealth can easily weigh on less powerful portable hardware. The biggest problems of LifeAfter: Night Falls emerge more in the long term and are linked to the balance of the loot and the mechanics of the crafting that tend dangerously to pay to win. The simplest crafting is based on the use of found materials for the construction of new objects, as is traditional, but to obtain more precious things it is necessary to use shards, to be invested in different tiers. These are rather rare objects which, however, seem not to often lead to hoped for results, which causes a certain frustration due to the imbalance created between the effort required to collect certain materials and the prizes that are obtained from them, with the suspicion that a Such a severe random dynamic tends to push towards the purchase of real money resources.
