Nakwon: Last Paradise feels more like lethal hide and seek than Zombie Tarkov

33614991

SHOULD I PLAY NAKWON: LAST PARADISE?

Best to wait on this one, as you’re not missing a whole lot in the pre-alpha test that’s running this weekend. Nakwon: Last Paradise is an extraction-style survival game set in Seoul, South Korea, after it’s been hit by a nasty zombie apocalypse. It’s a promising enough concept, but the current build is extremely bare-bones and prone to run-ending bugs and crashes.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about two hours of Nakwon: Last Paradise, all in solo mode. Quite a bit of that time has been spent waiting on the matchmaking system to link me up with other survivors or reloading the game after a crash. I’ve gotten eaten by zombies plenty of times, but I’ve also fallen through the world and gotten stuck in level geometry. I just ate my last cans of tuna and pineapple and have had to fashion clothing out of vinyl sheeting I found in trash bins.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT NAKWON: LAST PARADISE?

• Great atmosphere. South Korea makes some of the best horror movies out there, and if you’ve seen Train to Busan, you’ll know it’s a perfect setting for zombie outbreaks. I liked creeping around through dark abandoned stores and construction sites, clambering over destroyed cars, and winding my way through improvised barricades made of sheet metal and scrap timber. Nakwon is a distinctively Korean place, and that identity was reflected in not only the signage and items I found, but also in the building layouts and use of outdoor spaces.

• Weapons aren’t the focus. My favorite thing about Nakwon: Last Paradise is that it skips the extraction genre’s usual fixation on firearms. That’s certainly its own kind of fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s cool to see a game taking a different approach. Rather than picking up new laser sight mounting hardware and old bits of Soviet assault rifles, I was rummaging through trash cans looking for a couple boards to tie together to make an old fashioned zombie hittin’ stick. With a bit of barbed wire and plastic sheeting, I could make some functional arm guards.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN NAKWON: LAST PARADISE?

• Bugs. This is being called a “pre-alpha” build, and while I don’t think that’s an accurate use of the term, I understand that it’s meant to set expectations for the state of the game. That’s good, because this game is extremely buggy right now. As I mentioned above, I ran into issues with clipping through level geometry and crashes, which ended several runs. At one point, my character got stuck in a mantling animation and skated around the level in a semi-seated position for the rest of the run. In another, he ended up vertically shifted halfway into the floor.

• Combat is bad. I think the idea in Nakwon: Last Paradise is that fighting is something to be avoided if at all possible, and I think that’s a good concept to work from. However, there are melee weapons in the game, and I found them pretty frustrating to use. I was never sure of my weapon’s attack range, and so I ended up falling short with wild swings that used up my remaining stamina. Similarly, it was almost impossible to tell when enemy blows would land or miss.

• Lots of unused space. This again is probably a reflection of the pre-alpha state, but I saw lots of rooms and spaces that had nothing in them, just bare walls and floors. It’s a small thing, really, but it seriously undermined the sense of being in a real city—humans don’t let space go unfilled like that, rent is too expensive!

• Not much to do yet. There aren’t a lot of ways to interact with the world yet in Nakwon: Last Paradise. I found myself pretty much doing the same limited set of actions in each run: skulking through alleys and shops, looking for stuff I could sell or craft into better armor or weapons, trying to avoid zombies and other players, and getting the occasional silent takedown. That’s kind of all there is to it right now.

PLATFORM TESTED

PC, via Steam