About Project JoJo:
Reviewing this game feels like a daunting task. There’s so much I want to say, that I could write pages and pages on this game. Let’s just start with this: Zombies are popular enemies in games, because they enable lazy developers. You don’t need a story, but if you want one you can just rip off any established zombie lore. Your AI can be barebones with zombies that just path to the nearest player and attack once they get into melee. The lack of sophistication isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and so what if the path-finding is easily exploited and there’s no strategy at all. They’re zombies. They’re supposed to be stupid. Then you just give the player a gun, send wave after wave of Really fun and detailed little survival sim game. Stands out from the pack because the primary threat to your life is an actual active element of the environment (the zombies) instead of a stupid hunger bar that drains at some absurdly accelerated and unrealistic pace. The ways in which you can impact the world and vice-versa are extremely fine-grained by default and constructing an enjoyable ruleset from the character options and the actual custom game options is easy and intuitive. The only real downside is the standard one for “eternal public beta” games, which is that the documentation of what the mechanics are is entirely absent in-game and spotty or even actively misleading from out-of-game sources. The game is very good at being playable with basically no advance information but you’re very likely to miss entire systems on your first few dozen runs (you will do a lot of rather short lives before getting the hang of things well enough to survive multiple days). I especially recommend playing in real-time mode and using the fast-forward options for time skips instead of playing at the default 24x time dilation, it makes things super dramatic. And not being afraid to just turn off infectious zombies until you get the hang of the kind of odd cursor-based isometric combat well enough that you’re only getting bitten when you actually mess up, rather than whenever the system feels like arbitrarily having your character do something other than what you told it to do.
