My pre-release and early access coverage of Infected Shelter highlighted three main complaints: status effects that quickly drain your HP, screen busyness that makes it difficult to tell what’s happening around you, and context-sensitive pickups that render your strong attack worthless because of how frequently you’ll instead pick up a random item. Of those three complaints, only the first has been addressed. Infected Shelter‘s full-release content is almost identical to what was available in early access 6 months ago, with the most noticeable differences being a deluge of cheap elite enemies and a final boss who spams enemy summons and shares many sins with the elite enemies it’s derived from. I really liked this game at first, but only while operating under the assumption that everything would be polished up; Infected Shelter‘s release state is so repetitive and RNG-dependent that less than 1% of people have reached its ending. I’m part of that .9% percent, and it’s hard to recommend this anymore.

Infected Shelter review navigation (click to jump directly to section): Story review | Gameplay review | Bugs and issues | Visuals and music review

The game’s meaningless story only exists at the very beginning and very end

Infected Shelter begins with a scientist being kidnapped by Mad Max-esque raiders, and you only learn that she’s a biologist from the achievement you get after fighting your way to her at the very end. There’s a zombie apocalypse for reasons briefly touched on once you find her, but before that, you have no way of knowing why there are zombies around outside of this being a video game. Video games and zombies go together like peanut butter and jelly, which is to say that it’s a fine combination, even if the pairing is overused to the point of being boring. There’s a single victory screen after beating Infected Shelter that can be summarized as “some baddies got away, I guess, but everything mostly worked out anyway,” and the whole thing is uninteresting but perfectly functional. This isn’t a story-centric game by any stretch of the imagination.

Infected Shelter‘s beat-em-up combat is its high point but also its undoing

There are numerous types of potential upgrades that break down neatly into permanent bonuses and per-run bonuses. You begin by selecting one of four character types who have different strengths (Guitarist Girls are fast but weak, Big Biceps Builders are strong and slow, and the others are more balanced) and randomized names and jump right in. Infected Shelter is a beat-em-up at heart, so you have the ability to perform a few different moves and combos, though only the half of them that begin with a light attack are viable because starting a combo with a heavy attack will often result in picking up one of the million random items that litter the battlefield. You can’t afford too many mistakes in this game since there are no lives and dying sends you all the way back to the beginning. That can be a bitter pill to swallow in a game that takes an hour to beat.

Enemies frequently drop blueprint upgrades and the infection samples you need to spend to unlock them, though, and this is the benefit to starting over after death—you’re slowly chipping away at the game with more unlocked. Most of the blueprints you obtain pertain to items that then start showing up during your runs, but there are also passive upgrades that are permanent, increasing your health/damage or allowing you to retain more gold badge currency between runs.

If infection samples are Infected Shelter’s “unlock” currency, gold badges are its “buy stuff” currency. These drop less frequently than infection samples but can purchase per-run upgrades such as auto-attacking helpers, the ability to recognize the effects of the various drinks you find lying around (which is important given how many of them have negative effects), and passive bonuses to attack damage and other stats. All of this is balanced almost perfectly.

Infected Shelter‘s biggest problem is that it’s incredibly difficult to avoid taking damage, and there simply aren’t enough healing options out there. It was only when I got lucky and developed/found a per-run upgrade that allowed gold badges to heal health instead of functioning as currency during that playthrough that I managed to beat the game. Part of the problem is the visuals, which are a mess when things get chaotic. Between the bloody mess on the ground and the bloody zombies, it can be difficult to tell where everything is. Add in attack effects that cause parts of the screen to be awash in fire or electricity and the “blood spatter on the camera lens” foreground effect that occurs when you take damage and it’s practically unreadable. Status effects are also a problem. They may not whittle down your health as quickly as they used to, but a common status effect causes you to freeze for a moment, and you can rarely afford to have your ability to dodge stripped from you when fighting large groups.

For a game where taking damage is a foregone conclusion, though, Infected Shelter hasn’t done much to let you heal. Most healing items heal barely any HP (if you only get donuts and fruits, expect to burn through them all to heal yourself to maximum health), so the only real options for healing are random drops or randomly pre-generated traits. And even those have to be unlocked first through multiple failures. It’s a slog.

What’s the point of dodging if enemies can change direction in midair?

I should probably clarify what traits are before going any farther. After beating your first boss, you gain the ability to start a run with what amounts to positive and negative perks. You might have the opportunity to start a run with a character who does more firearm damage but also takes more firearm damage. The most helpful trait I’ve seen is one that allows Guitarist Girls to recover health as they do damage. Not all traits are created equal, though, and some of them are downright nonsensical. One claims that it causes your character to be worried about illnesses, but its effect is that your health starts off at 10% of its maximum while you take significantly less damage. As far as I can tell, all it does is make it harder to tell what your current health level is. Late-game difficulty spikes ensure that you can’t afford to work around a lack of clarity.

Infected Shelter‘s endgame content is absurd, with it simply spamming “elite” enemies who take forever to finish off. When each elite enemy is vulnerable for only around 2 attacks and you’re fighting 5 of them at once, the beat-em-up combat loses its sparkle and becomes aggressively tedious.

There are three elite enemy types: robots who spam attacks when their health is low, blade zombies who spin around when their health is low, and chainsaw zombies who are annoying regardless of how much health they have. The problem with chainsaw zombies revolves around an attack where they jump up and perform a downward chainsaw slash; for some reason, they can change their left-right direction at any point while they’re in the air. If you try to roll behind them to get in some attacks, you’ll instead watch as they instantly switch directions and bring that chainsaw down on top of you.

I can’t think of any other game where a character’s left-right facing is changeable in midair. You can adjust Mario in midair, but he always faces the same direction he jumped. The same goes for every other game I know, with Infected Shelter being the odd man out. Having to fight through a gauntlet of chainsaw enemies who spam these attacks is bad enough, but the final boss incorporates attacks from all three elite enemies and is similarly capable of changing his attack direction in midair. That’s in addition to spamming so much random crap that the only realistic way of beating him is to hoard tons of items until that one fight. You need RNG to get a good trait, RNG to get a good item that provides you with more healing opportunities, and RNG to obtain items to overcome the cheapness of the final boss and elite enemies that precede him. Unless you developed this game and have inside knowledge of all of the unclear hitboxes, you’re going to be hopelessly dependent on RNG to beat Infected Shelter. Your skill has less of an impact on your fate than luck.

Did the visuals really need to be such a cluttered, overwhelming mess?

I’ve already mentioned that it’s hard to see what’s happening toward the end of a run, but it’s such a problem that it needs to be mentioned again: there’s a full-screen blood spatter effect, attack effects that cause electricity bolts and/or fire that further obscures your view, and the dead bodies on the ground are colored similarly to the zombies you’re supposed to be fighting. It’s a perfect storm of badness. Something I haven’t mentioned yet is the slow-motion effect that happens when you defeat some enemies. I think it’s supposed to be cinematic, but it mostly just throws off your timing. Infected Shelter‘s soundtrack, on the other hand, has a strong sense of melody that I really appreciate. These tracks could stand out in another genre where they’re not overwhelmed by the shockingly loud sounds of chainsaws, explosions, and other effects.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Infected Shelter review screenshots

*A Steam key was provided for this Infected Shelter review. It took me 4 hours to beat when starting from scratch, which was necessary thanks to a pre-launch save wipe.

Infected Shelter review – Blowing it at the very end first appeared on Killa Penguin