I finally had a chance to play Deadzone last night when the Prodigal Gamer brought it over and we sat down to learn the game. With any new game, my first thoughts are always cautious, and a little bit stand offish. Deadzone however proved to be more than I was giving it credit for.
Deadzone comes with an amazing amount of miniatures for it. In fact many more than you will be using if you include the more expensive point cost leaders in your list. This allows you to get a wide variety of games in with just what comes in the box. This I liked a lot.
The contents also came with some very flexible clip together scenery, that was well done, and easy to understand the in game rules for on the table. While the terrain itself reminds me a little of Necromunda, or could even be used for Infinity, it holds its own for the game. A 2x2 playing matt also comes in the box, along with everything else you need to play the game.
Now over the case of 1 1/2 games that we played, we did get a few rules wrong. Which is OK, as we got the most of them down. The game is highly tactical, and I mean highly tactical for what it is. Its also very quick. Although our game took far too long as we were looking things up a lot, a typical game easily takes 60 minutes for two players, at the suggested 70pts level.
The games uses cards, which offer some tactical advantages, and they reminded me a lot of how the command cards work in Dropzone Commander, giving slight advantages if the cards are swinging your way, while not being overly powerful, or required to keep your fight going. In fact, each card has two options for you to use, which provides flexibility that can be used on the game mat.
The game itself was fun, and the balance of our match up ended up swinging several times during the game. The sniper on one side quickly sat up on a second level wall for sniping, while I had a plague dog that overreached to flush him out. The rest of the game was a bunch of tactical moves, of suppression fire, while larger hand to hand models moved forward to try and take out anyone that was covered under fire.
This style of suppression fire, and moving from cover to cover to reach your opponent balanced wonderfully. I was surprised at how well close combat and shooting was balanced in the game. The game truly felt like a close quartered firefight was underway in a heavily urban environment. It was crazy fun.
I highly suggest if you have not taken a look at this game, that you do. I would rank it in the top echelons of a table top wargaming experience.
A link to the game's website.
http://www.manticgames.com/games/deadzone.html