Our in-game fantasizing aside, Rebuild is a sort of Sim City through Oregon Trail type of experience. It's a survival simulator with hints of strategy and defense where you don't need to worry about killing zombies yourself, just getting folks in the right places to defend your ramshackle town.
The game play is a point and click affair tasking you with sending in soldiers to scout areas, recruiting new members, building new areas and upgrading current ones. You'll have to explore areas for food, technology and everything else you need to survive, but you'll also need to kill off mohawk punks zombies in the process as well as defend the area you call home. It's basically turn-based; each action takes a few days to complete while attacks are randomized, so even though you'll want to explore an area, you'll also want to keep people on tap to defend your town. It takes a little while to get the hang of it, but it's worth it in the end.
Two hours later you'll wake up blurry eyed and wondering what the hell happened to your afternoon. Rebuild is a well executed game that builds on a great concept. There's a delicate balance needed for a simulation game to work, and Rebuild nails it on most accounts. Every time you expand your area or meet new people, you have difficult choices to make because you need to feed and defend everyone. Worse still, the more people you have, the more zombies seem to show up, the more food you need and the less happy people seem to be. Basically, more people more problems, which is why we did our best to keep our operation small.
Visually, Rebuild is a generic affair, but with the exception of the hilariously bad attack animations, it works well enough. Considering the complexity of it, it's also pretty easy to pick up and play. There are even a few different endings of the game available, in case you're some type of creepy completionist freak.
You can play it here, but be forewarned, it may suck away a bit of your day if you find yourself enjoying it.
