Atelier 801 has a new game that just recently released called Dead Maze and you can download it from the Steam app page right now. The game is an isometric, MMORPG survival game. You have to go through all the basic survival needs of scavening for food and supplies, as well as dealing with massive hordes of zombies.

Unlike other zombie survival games out there, you can’t just rely on your own wits and whacking ability since there are just so many zombies on the screen. This is where the massive multiplayer aspects come into play, given that you’ll need to team up with other players to traverse through the city in order to survive the hordes and gather enough supplies to stay alive.

You’ll need to manage your hunger, thirst and fatigue, and gather up crafting material to rebuild civilization. You can check out the launch trailer below.

The graphics are definitely of the Flash-quality, with many gamers commenting about Dead Maze having phone-quality graphics. It’s true that the animations certainly aren’t the best and the overall graphical quality is pretty basic.

However, Atelier 801 decided to sacrifice graphics fidelity for gameplay functionality. The game allows you to acquire more than 500 different weapons, and just about anything you can pick up can be turned into a weapon.

The game focuses on a hit-and-run, party-style combat system, where the hordes are so large you have to move fast and work with your team to clear out an area and then get out before the rest of the horde catches up with you.

Conceptually it’s a pretty cool game, it’s just a shame we don’t have games like this on a larger scale. Well, DayZ was supposed to be like that but it just can’t seem to graduate from Early Access.

While you can build up your own camp and manage your own survival means, not everyone is enticed, enthralled or ebullient about the endgame content and overall scope of Dead Maze.

There’s a sizable number of gamers who enjoy Dead Maze, but there’s also a growing portion who have put in more than a dozen hours who feel the game has a short lifespan of enjoyment, with user Jam writing…

“The game itself has little to no content outside of the storyline, that eventually becomes a case of running back and forth through maps that get increasingly bigger and the difficulty of the story is based on if you get annoying zombie spawns or not. Once the story is finished you’re stuck grinding in a map killing zombies until you need to replenish your food and water bars at a campfire.

 

“The crafting dynamic of the game might of been interesting if not for the extremely high costs to craft things that aren’t efficient to craft and mostly a waste of time and resources.”

This particular complaint is echoed throughout the review section, but the rating for Dead Maze is still at “Mostly Positive” for the time being.

If you wanted to check it out for yourself, the game is free-to-play over on the Steam store, so it’s not like you would really lose anything checking it out.