ROAM
Quick vocabulary lesson for those of you not versed in nerd – sandbox games are those games where the player has free reign to wander about and pretty much make the game whatever they want it to be. Now a name like that evokes fuzzy memories of sunny days spent in the sandbox should be enough to make us all want to play right? Wrong. Remember the horror for finding a cat turd buried in the sandbox? In all truth sandboxes are the playground equivalent of a Petri dish with the unwanted surprise of the occasional sand-encrusted feline deuce and that pretty much sums up my feelings towards sandbox games as well – they look like a lot of fun, but it almost always ends with a cat dump. There are numerous sandbox games out there that have a solid premise, but they simply don’t deliver. This is most definitely not the case with ROAM.
According to ROAM’s kickstart page “the world is transforming into a nightmarish hellscape rife with vicious, flesh-eating monstrosities. Are you one of the resilient, embattled few who have what it takes to survive? Will you defy the seemingly impossible odds or will you succumb to the to the horrors that lurk in the dark?†Those few details and questions alone are more than enough to pique my interest, but the screenshots and promo videos sealed the deal.
The premise of ROAM is relatively straightforward. You are trying to survive a zombie apocalypse and can even play alongside a few friends, which isn’t a new concept, but what sets ROAM apart from the horde of zombie-themed, survival games is that that not only do you need to battle the undead, you also need to scavenge supplies and build a fort, all while dealing with human bandits as well as the undead.
The promo and concept videos show numerous environments and landscapes, ranging from the mountains to the suburbs, all of which had clean, well executed graphics. There were various types of zombies and bosses planned out and even the possibility of a mutate option where the game randomly applies mutations to groups of zombies making them more dangerous. Overall, the plan for ROAM is an ambitious one, but one that looks like it will have funding and talent required to successfully pull off, especially considering that most of what was found on ROAM’s kickstart page was done in only six weeks!
