Thinking of getting back into Dead State. It’s a spiritual sequel to Fallout 1 and 2 (and Tactics now that I have recently replayed that). It’s a turn based squad RPG set in a zombie apocalypse. It’s one of the few games that I feel properly balances combat against humans versus combat against zombies, exploring and looting, while managing a base, with speech checks and dialogue.

I finished it a few years ago but I messed up and caused some people to die and didn’t get the best ending with a couple of others. I also picked a kind of boring ending where the surviving military helps you evacuate, in exchange for your character being drafted as a commander of their forces.

What I really like is you have to balance the personalities and factions in your base. You can’t please everyone as different factions are diametrically opposed. But you can call in favors and persuade people to soften the blow. The other thing is you also manage your individual relationship with other survivors, but without any spoilers some survivors secretly (or openly) are real pieces of shit, so you’re better off antagonizing them and bringing them into line (even killing or exiling them), instead of placating or appeasing them, because if you do the later messed up stuff can happen between them and other survivors. Likewise other survivors who seem like dicks or useless really come out of their shells and become real team players.

The combat is basically like Fallout 2. You have action points, 2 weapon slots, you balance attacking versus moving etc. You can customize your own character to be good at melee, range or a mix of the two (my favorite as there’s some neat synergies that can make you a real jack of all trades MVP in a fight, but that’s balanced against not being the worlds best sniper or melee fighter).

You also go from being like Season 1 walking dead helpless survivors to unstoppable killers in customized body armour and weapons, clearing rooms with homebrewed nerve gas.