Of course, with such a huge territory to explore, you’ll need a new means of getting around. To that end, there are a bunch of new vehicles – including motorcycles and helicopters – that will allow you to traverse the environment with ease. Also, you can take the fight to the zombies atop your glorious steeds of death by firing your weapons while riding, driving, or piloting like never before. NetEase has also introduced a bunch of new effects that up the excitement of driving, including smoke, impact and explosion effects, and tire marks.
In fact, everything is a lot flashier than before. While LifeAfter was always a particularly good-looking game, a handful of under-the-hood engine optimisations breath new life to the world. This is perhaps felt most keenly in the new seasons system, which changes up the weather in line with the flow of time. Survival fans: that gives you a new element to think about, as extreme weather is yet another enemy threatening to end your life. You’ll need to adjust your equipment to adapt to changes in temperature, take shelter from storms and blizzards, and keep the food rolling in as previously bountiful hunting spots dry up.
Fortunately, your camps are now built into the seamless map, so you’re never too far away from shelter. You can also make use of the aforementioned structure system to make traversing the world during challenging seasons that much easier, as well as keep a vehicle or two on hand to make a quick exit from brutal storms.
The last major change we’d like to draw your attention to is the new treasure hunter profession, which is the perfect companion to a sprawling open world. As the name suggests, these folk scour the environment for hidden treasures, and have various bonuses to help them. This includes a greater ability to sniff out treasure, an increased mining limit, and a higher probability of identifying high-quality treasure.
It all adds up to create the ultimate survival simulator on mobile, one that has more in common with console and PC triple-A hits like State of Decay or Fallout 76 than it does most other mobile games.
If you’d like to check it out for yourself, you can grab LifeAfter. The massive season 3 update is available right now, featuring all of the above plus new mystic creatures, rescue missions, enemy types, trading outpost, and all of the gear you can shake a stick at.