Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, is a free ASCII (or with a tileset) open source, zombie based, rogue-like, set in a post-apocalyptic New England. You begin the game as a survivor in a scenario of your choice in a randomly generated world, from then on, your only task is to survive and eventually be free to do whatever you want, like to build a base and custom vehicle, or even become a mutated, solar powered, mess. This game is very open to do almost anything, except first; you must survive.



Before you can begin to enjoy Cataclysm, you will first need to create a character. You get to pick the scenario, which determines your starting location and the amount of "points" you get to spend in character creation, including possibly creating an unique challenge. You then add points to your four stats, traits and skills. At the end, you can also pick a profession which comes with set equipment and skills, professions provide the opportunity to role play a certain character. The professions list is quite long and covers almost everything you might want to play as.

The traits you can have determine which strengths and weaknesses you character will have. You can choose good traits and even bad traits which can add extra challenge. The good ones cost points, while the bad add points. You can also add some skills to your character which will make the start easier, your character can learn all available skills during the game, but a point in dodging or a combat skill at the start is still a sound investment. If you happen to not have enough points for everything you want, you can change the amount of points you get in the settings menu, set it to something high and you can experiment.

You can later further improve your character with mutations and bionics, which are implants that you perform on yourself which add useful functionality. Mutations can also be good or bad, some of which are very powerful. During the you game may notice that you have a "morale" counter which determines how your character feels, when it is low, your character has trouble learning skills and that can even decrease stats, but when it is much higher, you gain stats and can learn skills faster.

The world is randomly generated and has a few settings to customise the world, for example; setting the size of cities. The world will have large cities, small towns and even lone cabins. Rivers, roads and forests randomly snake through the map. Many locations are created, some of which are end game locations. The wilderness away from cities is usually quite empty of zombies, but the danger is still there, as wolfs and other wild animals may attack. Cities are the main source of zombies and even a horde may come towards you attracted by your noise.

You might notice that zombies could be heading towards you, and not the friendly kind of "zombie". Combat is almost as basic as it gets, you walk towards a zombie and do an attack, then they will attack you if you used your points for that turn. Each weapon has a certain amount of "points" it spends to attack, you have a base of 100 points, so if a weapon uses 200, then you will miss the next turn and the zombie gets two hits against you. if it uses 50, then you get to attack twice.

The amount of ways you can fight zombies is near endless. You can use melee weapons, which cause piercing, cutting or bashing damage, some weapons have more then one damage type. Each doing different amounts of damage against different foes. Some are even immune to certain damage types. You have ranged weapons, which includes many types of guns and throwing weapons. The bigger the gun, the louder and harder it hits, while a smaller one will keep you slightly quieter, the quietest being bows and crossbows and "energy weapons". For throwing based weapons, we have plenty to choose from too! you have your home made molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, plenty of real grenades, and even the legendary mini-nuke, good luck finding that one.

One other great "weapon" is martial arts, or unarmed combat. You have plenty of different styles to learn from different sources and each is slightly different from one another, some are offensive and others defensive. When you end up getting a very high level in unarmed skill, you will slaughter zombies with your skillful moves like it's nothing. To reach that point, you are going to need to battle a lot of zombies, and possibly die trying, not everyone can become the master of unarmed combat.

Any action that you do will almost always create noise. The louder you get, the more zombies you will attract around the city, and even attract a very large horde. The longer you survive the more "special" zombies will begin to appear, which have special abilities and strengths, they usually have more health too, so they don't go down easy.

To survive for any length of time, you are going to need to feed yourself. You will have to scavenge or hunt for food and water. Which means either going deeper into the cities or looking for wildlife in the forest. You will also need to find warm clothing when it gets colder, if you end up putting on too many clothes, you will end up encumbered and suffer penalties in an array of stats and skills.

One thing that you will be able to do in the mid to late game, is construct a vehicle. Cataclysm provides the ability to build the car of your dreams. It can be anything, you just have to find the materials and put it together. Build a moving wall of death with multiple engines, or a simple motorised shopping cart. You can even make your vehicle nuclear powered if you feel like it, but you'll need a source of uranium. building a vehicle is one thing, but you can also build a building, it can also be a simple cabin or a massive concrete bunker with underground tunnels.

Conclusion:

It's a zombie ASCII game, it may look simply from afar, but is actually very detailed and fun to play. If your first few characters can't survive the first night, then don't give up and keep trying. Don't forget to check out the forums and wiki for further information!

Get it here!