Off the bat, I wanna say that I WANT to love this game. I've had it in my library for years, and over a decade back, when Infectonator: Survivors was still a webgame and I had the original on my iPad as a young boy, this game was so different, and I remember it being fun, though that may be nostalgia. That being said, this game, in two words?

Frustratingly unenjoyable.

There's a handful of standard or otherwise cool game design elements here, along with a solid pixel-art style, decent soundtrack, and seemingly some thought put into progression, that could - altogether - make up a fun and engaging zombie survival strategy game. Unfortunately, all the good things this game has to offer are sorely interspersed with and totally outbalanced by a lack of cohesion, unengaging and flimsy gameplay, and a pervasive feeling of "why am I even playing this" at every setback on any scale.

On a broad scale, this game boils down to "night begins, enter an area, slowly creep through it for about 10-15 minutes, scavenge as much as possible, leave, repeat until morning, set some task for your survivors, wait for them to finish it, nightfall and repeat." There are flashes of slightly enjoyable moments, at times when you scrape through a tough situation by the skin of your teeth, but the vast majority of the actual gameplay going on here is pointing and clicking with little engagement or fun beyond that. It's like Age of Empires 2 if it was much slower, much less exciting, and you could only do, like, four things in total, instead of carefully positioning and maneuvering your characters.

On a level of finer detail, there are a LOT of things I dislike. The biggest problem with this game is that it simply does not make it easy enough for you to even settle in to enjoying it, because your characters start off pretty bad. Like, "miss most of their shots, can't outrun the first enemy encountered, die in under 6 seconds of being near a zombie without armor" bad. I've played several runs through, and all but 1 ended in the first 2 nights because it was genuinely so frustrating, for a variety of reasons.

The biggest and absolute worst reason is MOVEMENT. Let me again use Age of Empires 2 as an example: in that game, knights are fast cavalry troops, whereas healing monks are slow ground troops. However, if you have a group of knights AND monks selected, and you tell this group to move somewhere, the knights will assume the speed of the monks, that they will not get left behind. Monk being left to lag behind, in AOE2, is nothing more than a waste of time, but in Infectonator: Survivors, your characters will NEVER adjust their movement speed, and in a fixed, tile-based strategy game, with poor aim and reloadable weapons with a fixed, lackluster range, one which takes place in many levels of tight corridors and will NOT hesitate to swarm you? Yeah, you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Seriously, I cannot overstate how incredibly tedious it is; in the early-game, you CANNOT have a character be on their own when more than a few zombies suddenly appear, or they are virtually guaranteed to die. Tell me, if your gameplay could be summed up as "you have to search a large map, with one character skittling ahead and the other dragging behind like concrete, requiring you to go step-by-step, and doing that for thirty minutes would be for nothing if so much as four or five shots were missed or zombies appeared and you would die," would you say you have made a good game?

I have a bunch of other things I could mention -- the daytime segments are dreary, you rely on nothing but RNG to get the supplies you need, the "quests" and "events" are as enthralling and exciting as cold, wet bread, YOU WILL DIE EARLY ON MANY TIMES if you do not manage to get any form of armor to negate damage (given that your characters have the vitality of a dried cactus spine), and so on. This game is fundamentally not fun.

Again, presentation-wise, this game is pretty good. But gameplay-wise, as someone who has played the original Infectonator multiple times over and grew up with this game in its earliest forms, I cannot find it within me to finish this game, because every time I hit a game over (no manual saving/loading and 1 save slot only btw lol), it's back to square one, and squares one through ten of this game's progression are so grating and unfulfilling I'd rather belt sand my genitals to a fine dust than bear them again.