By Chris Picone, 07 August, 2025

I never played the first Endzone so I went into this one with no real expectations other than a bit of excitement based on the screenshots and trailers I'd seen shared on Twitter.  Endzone 2 is a solid city builder that makes good use of the environment, the apocalyptic setting, and which also includes an innovative exploration mechanic that's fantastic for filling the downtime while waiting for research or resources to accumulate. 

Aesthetics

The graphics are surprisingly good; I already thought they looked very decent glancing at the zoomed out shots of sprawling apocalyptic settlements, but the real beauty's found in the detail when you zoom in.  Everything's cobbled together from scrap, everything looks makeshift and functional, and you even get to watch your settlers moving about living their best lives. It's a surprisingly colourful world too.  Sure, there's plenty of dried out yellows and browns you'd expect from any wasteland setting - but the world's not entirely dead.  In fact, much of it is flooded, so you will find patches of forest and fertile soil, and even swampland. Possibly my favourite detail though, and one that brought the world to life for me, is the reactive nature of the map.  For example, forests thin out as your lumberjacks do their work.  Likewise, much of the landscape is littered with scrap and rubbish strewn across the landscape, which becomes remarkably tidier as your salvagers sift through the junk and send it all for recycling. 

Gameplay

The base of the game is like any other city builder these days, although with the expected apocalyptic slant. You build tents for your settlers (which of course eventually upgrade to housing), and need to start collecting food and water to keep them alive.  There's variety even from the outset, and it's necessary: You settle in zones, and each zone has its own landscape, which means you can use fishermen in some areas, but in others you might need to resort to foraging.  From there, you need to collect and ever-more-complex series of other resources.  For example, scrap and wood, which can be used to make tools, which are in turn used to mine, and eventually sent to tradesmen to create more complex resources and buildings.  Food and water aside, this is an apocalyptic setting, so you also need to produce things like carbon and rubber to create masks, gloves, and other radiation protection.  As I mentioned, each zone features different eco systems, so you will need to create and manage multiple settlements to enable trade between them.  That kind of production takes a lot of settlers - and the more settlers you have the faster you burn through resources, and resources are already limited, so you can definitely run out. And if that weren't enough of a challenge, Endzone 2 also throws weather events like droughts at you - and there are even raiders!  You will also need to research, and this is accomplished by exploring ruins in the area.  Some ruins are just there for scavenging but many are interactive, including things like gas plants and power stations that can be restored.  Many require equipment found in other ruins to progress further and I liked both the interconnection and honestly just the break from the tedium of waiting for resources to accumulate.  Finally, I want to touch on the game modes.  I started with the gigantic tutorial, which does a good job of showing you every mechanic in the game, but also includes a ton of hand-holding and takes a whopping ~5 hours! Then there's the expected open survival mode.  Finally, there are challenge modes, which are shorter and require you to beat specific objectives.  I'd love to see either a story mode or else sections of story more heavily injected into the challenge modes, but I suppose one can't have everything. 

Verdict

Endzone 2 is currently sitting with a mixed review on Steam, which I find interesting.  At a glance, it appears the majority of the negative reviews stem from those who played the original and prefer it over the sequel.  Without any comparison to make all I have to say is that, in its own right, Endzone 2 is a great game.  It's not perfect - a little unnecessarily convoluted in some areas, lacking variety and occasionally repetitive in others, but I've never played a city builder that isn't in some way.  I also would have loved a story-based mode, but I'm very happy with the game in its current state. 

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2144640/Endzone_2/