Endzone 2

Endzone 2 was provided by Assemble Entertainment for us to review. Thank you!

This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.

Endzone 2 stands out from its peers in the city-building genre by using a post-apocalyptic setting. This choice of setting brings with it plenty of new opportunities, as well as some difficulties. Endzone 2 has a unique blend of using the technology you have to survive in a primitive setting. It's best described as a survival city-builder, where water and food are your top priorities, not providing a sturdy road network and building your tourism.

When you start a game of Endzone 2, you are confronted with a bounty of choices, which is excellent. It could look daunting from the outside, a post-apocalyptic city-builder where survival is the aim of the game. It could give you the impression there's constant pressure on you, and this isn't a game where you can relax at all, and that isn't the case.

The game does let you tweak the settings to be unforgivable brutal, or pretty forgiving, giving you a chance to play your way. Being entirely new for the franchise, I played on a mixture of both, where bad things could happen, but their effects weren't quite as pronounced as they could be.

In Endzone 2, the world has been destroyed, and large portions of the land aren't suitable for habitation. You start the game with a truck and must explore the nearby world to find a "zone," designated for building. Once there, you can create a settlement, place your town center, and work on providing the necessities of food, water, wood, and scrap.

Food can be gained from the arable land in the zone, water from lakes, wood from forests, and scrap from ruined buildings. Zones vary in size, but regardless, you need to plan out your building. Placing buildings could take away valuable arable land in short supply. Building around the water sources may take away space that you'll need for future jetties to gather water or fishing huts to gather food. The amount of space is limited, and one of the key elements of Endzone 2 is learning how to use it.

My first zone was a pretty small one, and after a couple of hours of playtime, I had pretty much used up all the available land, so it was time to load up some supplies and citizens into my truck and head off in search of another zone. After a few minutes of searching, I found one, a luscious zone filled with grass and about 4 times the size of my initial choice. You can run multiple settlements in Endzone 2, requiring you to have some micro-management ability. The saving grace here is that the game does have time controls, and when the game is paused, you can still manage everything. It doesn't lock the UI.

Progression comes in the form of Knowledge Points. You can spend Knowledge Points to unlock new building tiers across 3 categories: Society, which covers housing and health. Ecology covers things related to nature, such as farming, recycling, water treatment, etc. And the economy, which covers all kinds of industries.

Not only are you tasked with managing your settlement(s), but you also have your truck, which can ferry resources between settlements and be used to explore the game world, loot ruins, and occasionally find a point of interest where you can start an expedition. These expeditions put you in control of a single person and let you explore a ruin in a sort of point-and-click style puzzle/adventure. You'll need to find all the loot and have the relevant items/tools to progress through the expedition. If you make it to the end, you're rewarded with a bunch of resources, or a facility you can use. You'll also earn Knowledge Points as you progress through an expedition.

As far as the random events that can happen throughout the game go, I mostly encountered 3: Rain, Drought, and Sickness. You have to contend with Radiation and Catastrophes, but I didn't encounter these in my playthrough. Rain and drought, as you might imagine, mainly affect your food and water supplies, whereas sickness lowers the production of all your buildings and carries the risk of losing some citizens to disease.

You can mitigate the effects of these events by being well-prepared. For Drought, at least, you get some warning, so you can build up your supplies of food and water to ensure you survive it. When it comes to disease, it's suddenly put upon you, but you can at least lower the chances of it by having healthcare facilities and supplies.

The supply chains in the game are there but are fairly basic. You can gather Scrap from ruins using a Scrapyard, which you can turn into Tools at a Workshop or Plastic at a Recycler. Production buildings then use tools to produce resources. Coal from a Kiln and Clay from a Claypit can be turned into Bricks at Brickworks. You can build a Swamp Farm near a swamp to gather Herbs, which, combined with Plastic, can be turned into medicine. Water and Fiber from a Plantation can be turned into Cloth at a Weaving Mill. You get the idea that the chains are rarely more than 3 buildings long, and things are generally kept simple.

Regarding the visuals, Endzone 2 goes for a realistic, gritty/dark-looking atmosphere. And while it does suit the game quite well and is invariably good-looking, I found that it doesn't necessarily lend itself to clarity. Many of the buildings look similar, so it can be quite hard to identify specific buildings just by looking, and I often found myself clicking several buildings before I found the one I was looking for. Some things can also be hard to spot, blending in with the ground or foliage. It's probably more pronounced on the Steam Deck's smaller screen, but it can sometimes be frustrating.

I liked my time with Endzone 2; it's a unique take on the City-Builder genre, and I love city builders. I feel like the game needs to go deeper with its economical aspects while it's in Early Access, however, with most buildings being unlocked after just 2-3 hours, and from then on, you're just getting upgrades of existing buildings which produce slightly faster. This may be less of an issue on higher difficulties, where I assume you're meant to not survive for too long on your first few attempts.

Endzone 2 - Steam Deck Performance

Endzone 2 does support 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions, including the native 1280x800 of the Steam Deck. It also has some UI scaling, up to 125%, which you will want to use, as the default 100% is quite hard to read on the Steam Deck. The game has no gamepad support, so we must use the Mouse+KB Layout, which is selected by default. This works fine for the most part, but you probably want to enable backgrip buttons and assign one to Middle Mouse Click so you can hold it and rotate the camera. Some scroll bars are also quite difficult to click on with the touchpad.

I also found the loading times to be very lengthy. In the modern world of SSDs, loading times have sort of disappeared into the background, and we don't notice them as much, but Endzone 2 has some spectacular loading times on the Steam Deck. Reaching the main menu takes, on average, around 40-45 seconds on my Steam Deck. Loading my save game took 2 minutes and 16 seconds. Fortunately, there are no loading screens once you're in a game, but it is the longest time I've waited to get into a game.

There are a few graphical settings, but not many, and they're kept fairly basic. Anti-aliasing, for example, is a simple on/off toggle rather than being able to select the quality of it. Besides that, we have Texture and Shadow Quality and then toggles for things like Bloom and Fog.

Interestingly, although Endzone 2 is far more GPU-bound than CPU-bound on the Steam Deck, changing these graphical settings has little impact on performance, with gains of about 6-8 FPS from the lowest to the highest settings. So I suggest you just run with the best graphical settings and accept the slight frame rate loss. Regardless of your choice, you cannot maintain 30 FPS throughout anyway.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

In your SteamOS settings, set an FPS Limit of 30 FPS / 60Hz; No TDP Limit for this one.

While at this point, I would typically tell you what settings to choose, ultimately, the experience is similar regardless of your settings, so I just ran with the maximum possible. I also used the Vulkan API on boot instead of DirectX11, as performance on DX11 is just worse. If you choose to lower your settings, I would avoid the "None" Shadow Quality, as it produced visual glitches for me.

At the max settings, the game runs at 30 FPS most often, with occasional dips into the 20s during certain camera cuts, such as when starting an expedition. What I did find, however, is that areas with great amounts of grass and/or scrap will tank the performance. Whether you are on the highest or lowest settings, the FPS will be between 20-25 FPS.

The plus side to this is that as you build buildings on the grass and harvest the scrap, it gets rid of it, so Endzone 2 might be one of the rare instances where the game runs a bit better late-game than it does early-game.

The power draw is pretty high in Endzone 2, with my Steam Deck usually pulling around 24-26W from the battery. So, Steam Deck LCD owners can expect no more than 1.5 hours of playtime from a charge. Steam Deck OLED users might manage 2 hours at a push.

Temperatures are also high, with the CPU and GPU staying around 80-85C at all times. The fan will also remain audible throughout playing.

It's also worth noting that Endzone 2 is currently in Early Access as of this review, so hopefully, we'll see some optimizations with the game as development progresses.

Accessibility:

Endzone 2 has some accessibility options, such as the UI above scaling. You can also disable screenshake, rebind your controls, and adjust the volumes of many sounds independently of each other. Any essential dialogue is written on the screen, so those with hearing impairments shouldn't miss out on any necessary audio cues.

Conclusion:

Endzone 2 shows great promise. Sure, a few things are rough around the edges, like the seeming lack of progression. I'd love to see some borders around buildings or toggleable icons to see which building is which, but in time, I think Endzone 2 will be a great game to challenge yourself with if you're looking for that city-builder that's just a bit brutal. After all, it is still in Early Access at the time of this review, and we do have a roadmap with promised new features and further progression that will be added.

As far as how it performs on Steam Deck goes, it's close to being perfectly playable. It's just certain areas on the map that let it down, with drops down to 20 FPS. It's hard to recommend playing Endzone 2 on a Steam Deck. You can play it, and it is playable, but you'll have a much nicer experience right now on a bigger screen and with a more powerful computer.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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