Urban Strife blends turn-based combat and survival in a zombie apocalypse. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the demo, and more.
Everything We Know About Urban Strife
Urban Strife Plot
Urban Strife is set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a zombie outbreak, where players must lead a small colony of survivors. The game focuses on survival mechanics, resource gathering, and interactions with other groups, both friendly and hostile, as you navigate a dangerous and unforgiving environment.
The narrative unfolds through missions, dialogue, and encounters, introducing players to a variety of characters, each with unique traits and potential roles in your survival strategy. These characters help shape the story, though the overall focus remains on the colony's survival rather than individual character arcs.
Urban Strife Gameplay
Urban Strife combines turn-based combat with survival mechanics, allowing players to manage a team of survivors while completing missions. Combat is fully manual, meaning players control the sequence of actions for their party members during encounters. Each character has a stamina meter, dictating how many actions they can perform in a single turn, such as attacking, moving, or using items.
Character traits play a significant role in gameplay, with party members specializing in different skills, such as healing, ranged combat, or melee attacks. Some characters are essential for specific tasks, like medics who are the only ones capable of reviving downed allies. Losing key members can have long-term consequences, as the game features a permadeath mechanic.
Outside of combat, players take on missions to gather resources, aid their colony, and complete objectives in various environments. These missions are central to the game’s progression and often involve scavenging supplies or fighting enemies. Loot collected during missions can be brought back to the colony, though the direct impact of these contributions is minimal in the current early-access build.
Urban Strife Release Date
Urban Strife was released in Early Access on December 10, 2024 for PC via Steam. The game’s full release date is yet to be announced.
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| Price | $34.99 | ||||
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Urban Strife Review (Demo)
So Simple It's Boring
One of the first things that stands out in Urban Strife is its AI-rendered character portraits. These visuals feel oddly disconnected from the rest of the game’s aesthetic. The gritty, apocalyptic world sets a tone of desperation and survival, but these character images feel overly polished and artificial. Instead of enhancing immersion, they create a jarring disconnect. It’s hard to take the grim setting seriously when NPCs in dialogue bubbles look so clean and refined, almost as if they were cut-and-pasted from a different game.
The voice acting further exacerbates this issue. Many of the lines sound like they were AI-generated or poorly acted, lacking the depth and emotional nuance needed to match the setting. A character like Lucy Li, whose design seems inspired by Lucy Liu, is a prime example. Sometimes her voice lines sound professional, but at other times, they veer into caricature, with stereotypical accents breaking the immersion entirely. This inconsistency makes interacting with the game’s characters a frustrating experience.
Another problem is how little voice work there actually is. Dialogue often alternates between voiced lines and plain text, which makes the transitions feel incomplete. In a game where atmosphere is critical, these audiovisual choices fail to deliver the impact needed to fully draw players into its world. The use of AI elements, whether in visuals or voiceovers, feels more like a cost-saving measure than an intentional design choice, and it detracts from the overall experience.
If the developers intend to continue using AI in these areas, they’ll need to invest significantly in refining its implementation. Alternatively, replacing these elements with more authentic and cohesive designs could better align with the game’s tone. Players who value immersion may find these flaws difficult to overlook, especially in a game that relies on its atmosphere to set itself apart.
Clunky UI and Questionable Colony Management
Urban Strife’s HUD is one of the game’s weaker points, especially for new players. The interface feels unintuitive at first, making it difficult to navigate missions and manage your party effectively. For a game that demands strategy and attention to detail, having to wrestle with the HUD adds unnecessary frustration. Over time, you can adapt to its quirks, but the initial learning curve could turn some players away. A more streamlined and user-friendly design would go a long way in making the experience more enjoyable.
Colony management, an advertised feature of the game, also feels underwhelming. While you can loot supplies during missions and bring them back to your colony, the system doesn’t seem to have any meaningful impact. Whether or not you contribute resources, the colony remains largely unaffected. This lack of tangible consequences undermines the sense of responsibility and progress that should come with managing a survivalist community.
The absence of depth in colony management is a missed opportunity. The concept itself holds a lot of promise—players could have been tasked with making tough decisions about resource allocation, prioritizing survival or growth, and facing the consequences of failure. Instead, the system feels tacked on, offering little more than a superficial layer of interaction. For a game priced at $30, players are right to expect more robust mechanics in this area.
If the developers expand on this feature, it could significantly enhance the overall experience. Giving players a deeper connection to their colony, with visible changes based on their actions, would add stakes and purpose to the missions. Without it, the colony management system feels like a placeholder rather than a core mechanic.
Repetitive Missions and a Thin Narrative
The missions in Urban Strife quickly fall into a repetitive cycle, which diminishes their appeal over time. Most tasks involve building rapport with other survivalists, exterminating gang members or zombie hordes, but it all feels like completing objectives that feel like variations of the same formula. While this structure aligns with the survivalist theme, the lack of variety makes the gameplay start to feel like a chore. Completing missions begins to feel more like ticking boxes than engaging with a dynamic world.
Adding to the monotony is the weak narrative. The story feels like an afterthought, serving more as a setting than a driving force. It lacks emotional depth or meaningful stakes, making it hard to feel invested in the game’s events. The characters you meet, while functional in gameplay, don’t bring enough personality or backstory to elevate the experience. As a result, the narrative feels like a missed opportunity to enrich the gameplay.
The dialogue and interactions don’t help much either. Conversations with NPCs are often bland and fail to add intrigue or context to the missions. Instead of feeling like a vital part of the world, NPCs come across as generic quest-givers with little to make them memorable. This lack of connection to the world and its inhabitants leaves players detached from the story, reducing the sense of immersion.
If Urban Strife hopes to stand out in a crowded genre, it will need to revamp its approach to narrative and mission design. Adding variety to missions and creating a more engaging story would go a long way in keeping players invested. For now, these elements feel like placeholders rather than fully realized features.
The Game’s Saving Grace
Combat is where Urban Strife manages to redeem itself, though it isn’t without flaws. The turn-based system offers a manual approach, letting players decide the order of actions and when to end their turn. This adds a layer of strategy that can feel rewarding, especially as you become more familiar with the mechanics. Each character’s limited stamina adds an extra dimension, forcing you to plan your moves carefully.
The permadeath system also raises the stakes in combat. When a critical party member like a medic is permanently lost, it fundamentally changes how you approach future battles. This mechanic demands strategic thinking and adds tension to encounters, as every decision could have lasting consequences. Sharing resources among party members, like bullets or healing items, adds another layer of strategy and reinforces the importance of teamwork.
However, the combat system isn’t perfect. The pacing can feel slow, especially in the early stages when you’re still learning the ropes. This can be off-putting for players expecting faster, more dynamic gameplay. Additionally, the mechanics, while solid, don’t introduce much innovation. They rely on familiar turn-based RPG conventions, which might feel dated or overly familiar to some players.
Despite its flaws, the combat system grows on you over time. It’s the one area where the game shows genuine promise, offering enough depth and challenge to keep you engaged. If the developers focus on refining and expanding this aspect, it could become a standout feature. For now, it serves as the primary reason to stick with Urban Strife, even if the rest of the game struggles to keep up.
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Urban Strife Product Information
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| Title | URBAN STRIFE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | December 10, 2024 More Details |
| Developer | White Pond Games |
| Publisher | MicroProse Software |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | RPG, Survival, Strategy |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | M |
| Official Website | Urban Strife Official Website |
