Death Road to Canada is a very interesting take on the Roguelite genre. Take Organ Trail, and give it some beat-em up shooter elements in the missions themselves in a 8bit art style and you get Death Road to Canada.

The core concept is you start with a character and a optional buddy and make your way to Canada to avoid the zombie apocalypse in America since Canada in this universe is a much stronger country then America. But to do that you have to traverse what many in Post-apocalyptic America in this universe call the Death Road to Canada to make your way there to it.

The game has 2 modes of play the first is in Traveling mode where events can happen while your driving/walking to canada. And you have to respond to them accordingly while the events themselves are random the outcomes are psudo random some are just luck while others are skill checks that base themselves on the skills of the characters in your party.

The 2nd mode is the action mode where your in a mission trying to either loot, escape, or hold ground aggainst a siege. Looting occurs where your group decides to loot a location while on the death road. You get the choice between 1-3 locations depending on luck and certain traits. Locations labeled in white are normal, Locations in red are more difficult because of zombies/hazards, and possess more to them, and blinking locations are locations that are special rare locations that can be difficult to deal with. In any mission you are given the option to ready your party with items from your inventory in preparation of the event normally characters can hold 3 items however some may have traits or perks that limit this.

Weapons/tools are broken into a few catagories. There is Melee which are weapons you swing and poke at zombies with some are more powerful then others and some can break with a chance on every hit others are unbreakable. Guns dont break but require ammo to use. Motorized items like say the chainsaw dont break but require gas to operate. Battery or charge based weapons are weapons or tools that have there own use charges that are isolated to the weapon using it drains the uses of the weapon.

And then there is utility which is mainly the flashlight and healing spray. The flashlight you start with 2 in your party inventory by default these let you see in the dark you can technically see in the dark but everything is siloutted making it hard to distinguish what is in the dark but it comes at the cost of a inventory slot. But you dont have to hold it to benefit from its light holding it does give greater light but you still benefit from the majority of the light when not holding it.

The healing spray lets you spray a character to heal 1HP of there heart if they took damage getting grabbed by a zombie is not a sure fire hit. Your character elicits exclamations and question marks when touched by a zombie but thats not damage. You will take damage if a zombie touch's you for to long where youll see blood and your heart will pop up from your panel showing its been reduced.

As for character Stats the characters stats are noted by a face its a scale of 0-6 by default. The angry red face is 0, A upset pink face is 1, a purple frown is 2, a blue streight face is 3, a cyanish smile is 4, and a greenish happy face is 5, the bright lime green very happy face is 6. If the face is blinking a angry red that means a stat is in the negatives on the contrary if its blinking and is super happy it means its 7+ as skills and traits can allow stats to go beyond the default range of 6 however it wont tell you the stats exact ammount, so youll have to keep in mind on the count in your head.

Stats are broken into a few catagories.
Base stats include moral, Vitality, and Dexterity these aside from moral not noted on the character bio. Vitality, denotes max health by default starting at 3 less will see your heart look less filled, more then 3 and your hearts begins getting a 2nd blue layer, Dexterity denotes movement speed which by default starts at 0 and raising this gives a speed boost. And moral denotes how the character is doing if a characters moral drops to 0 a terrible despair event can trigger while traveling which can really hurt you so its best to keep your party in good spirits.

Combat Stats include Strength, Fitness, and Shooting. Strength improves the cooldown swing of weapons helping with larger weapons with long cooldowns, and reduces energy use when using them it also denotes how fast you can rev up a motor wepon. Fitness denotes maximum stamina how much you can keep swinging before your character gets tired. Shooting improves long range accuraccy, shot penetration to hit more zombies, and shot bounce chance off walls.

Support stats, are Medical and Mechanical. Medical denotes how much medical is used when a survivor is healing others and how much they can heal in a interval if they max it to 6 they can even do improvised healing letting them heal 1hp without medical while traveling also it effects any event where medical is involved. Mechanical denotes how well the character can tinker within events, but also lets them repair the car if it breaks down.

Then there is Personality Stats. Wits, Attitude, Composure, and Loyalty. This is often randomly rolled unless a certain trait or perk presets it to a certain value, and decides how your character handles himself with certain events. Wits denotes intellect how well they can logic a situation out, Attitude deduces how well they act, Composure represents a characters patience, and Loyalty denotes how loyal they are to others and the party.

These are not only used for certain event checks but they also are used for personality stat combos that give special event options during a event.

After a run you often get Zombo points from various things which can be spent on upgrades to make your traits, and perks more powerful on encountered characters, and ones you create while also unlocking more of them. And a special Gnome can be found in the unlocks village to unlock special bonuses to make rare events more likely and to increase your means to get Zombo points and the ammount you can hold onto at any one time so you get more from every run.

Overall I place the game at a 8/10 the game is a absolute gem in the Roguelite genre the biggest downside that I dock 2 points for though is the ungodly grind...
Its the Zombo points or ZP and Unomey's upgrades that are the worst offender of this ungodly grind... A good run of Death Road at normal length lends at most 8-15 ZP depending on the ZP boosters you have and how many you find in your loot runs. But those boosters cost alot... And you can only hold 10 Zombo points in total at the begining, and you either have to beat the normal deadly road and Deadlier road to get the first two zombo point capacity upgrades or buy the capacity upgrades from Unomey which you will have to do for the rest... Even if you unlock the first two its still alot of ZP to get the rest and because upgrades are liniar you have to unlock a few of Unomey's extremely expensive upgrades to get those ZP boosters and capacity upgrades to make grinding faster...

What I did to make this ungodly grind managable is to get Extra ZP III and used its benefit to gain 1 ZP per recruit and then start by myself and go into the game mode 4 jerks mode which forces you to enter a special building to recruit custom characters you make at the start reset, rinse and repeat till I basically grinded out all the ZP to get everything...but even then this extremely efficent grind strat took 3 HOURS, could you [EXPLETIVE] imagine having to grind out the ZP by default...you would easily have to clock in 100+ hours just to unlock everything... So I can create characters to my hearts content...Thats [EXPLETIVE] Ridiculous man... so needless to say amazing game but if you dont do ZP Grind strats youll be there for a LOOONG time grinding the games unlocks out...

The year 2025

*♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tells the Steam Reviews to COOL IT

Nobody commented under your review (because you didn't enable them ya dink!). The group decides to pretend this review doesn't exist and leaves before anyone could notice.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥'s Morale: :D -> :)

Dingus' Morale: :| -> :(

Craig's Morale: :D -> :)

Roosevelt's Morale: :( -> >:(

The group eats a decent meal
LOST -8 Food