Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadville – restore order with your sniper rifle and top hat.

Rebuild is a 4x game by Northway Games that humbly started as a flash game and crafted its way into a full release steam game about rebuilding civilization in the zombie apocalypse. My review is long overdue to Rebuild’s latest installment, Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadville since it has been on my library as early as 2015. To be perfectly honest, Rebuild 3 is something that I will ALWAYS recommend for a 4x game. It has a flexible single-player storymode and a solid quickmode for a custom game. In Rebuild 3, you lead a group of survivors during the zombie apocalypse where its premise is simple: survive and thrive.

Players can either expand or escape the city on each map. To survive, players will only need to manage the group’s health, food, and happiness. To expand, players will need to reclaim nearby zombie infested buildings by eliminating the infestation which consume ammo. When a building is reclaimed, it becomes annexed to your fort and your territory grows. As your territory grows, so is the need for more people to guard it. In return, players will need to scavenge for resources such as food, fuel, material, ammo, and medicine. Most notably, equipment are found on scavenging runs which will aid the survivor’s primary skill. 

Your expansion is developed through the combination of reclaiming homes, building farms, and recruiting survivors. You can then complement this growth with researching technologies to make your fort more secure, trading with other factions for resources/equipment, and improving defenses on your border. If you’re able to reclaim the map in a certain way, you can halt the growth of the zombie horde. Thus it is possible to eradicate any threat whether zombies or hostile factions. 

Each survivor can assume one of five roles: soldier, leader, scavenger, builder, and engineer. Soldiers are responsible for your fort’s offense and defense. Leaders will tend to trading, recruitment, and happiness. Scavengers will find resources as well as tend to farms. Builders will build structures inside your safe-zone as well as generate lumber for material. Engineers can craft items and research helpful technologies. But in the end, anyone in your pool can still perform missions not of their expertise.

There are different factions in Rebuild 3 who are also trying to survive the zombie apocalypse but they are also wary of your presence. Each faction has its own outlandish personality. A few of these are the ‘remnant’s of the government, vegan hippies, and desperate pharmacists. As the primary leader of your faction, it falls upon your decision on how your group interacts with each faction whether to ally or deem anyone as hostile. However, I found it more beneficial to have them at least neutral to enable trade.

You will also run into many random events. The developer noted as much as 200,000 words of events, though now I find many of them repetitive. Some of the events are guests who will ask for help; or other factions demanding for tribute; or one of the children you rescued coming of age and joining your cause. Lovely.

One feature that I wish would be present in Rebuild 3 is for the zombie horde to attack any faction in the map; it seems that only the player faction gets attacked. I haven’t seen a zombie horde or a mob attack a nearby separate faction. I also haven’t seen a computer faction attack another computer faction. That would definitely add more dynamic events occurring on the map. One thing’s for sure, once a mob or horde is scouted, prepare your soldiers to defend the fort.

The art of Rebuild 3 is passable. It didn’t turn me off even at my first playthrough. The music is enjoyable too. The art is nothing special, but one that is personal to Rebuild 3. Frankly, I’ve overlooked at the characters and they grew up on me.

Rebuild 3 is a 4x game that is easy to play: reclaim nearby tiles, replenish resources, and recruit folks — rinse and repeat. It has this romantic idea of rebuilding a civilization after the zombie apocalypse. You can adjust the pace as it is semi turn-based and real-time, and it plays like a single player board game. I almost forgot to mention that the game is moddable. So again, let me put it another way: Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadville is a game that I CANNOT NOT recommend.