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ADACA
Released on Steam July 25th, 2022, ADACA is an FPS heavily inspired by Half-Life 2 and STALKER. I first learned about the game from a post on Rock Paper Shotgun. While the post is for subscribers only (which I am not), something about the intro sentence grabbed my attention. I tinkered with the demo for an hour or so, bought the game shortly thereafter, and dived in from there.
ADACA has two primary modes:
The campaign itself, while a great experience on its own, is fairly straightforward and took me around 5 hours to complete. You wake up from cryo-sleep with a gravity-manipulating arm, the Police arrive to confront the local Free Scrappers, and you work to help the Scrappers fight back. Cue the shooting!
Zone Patrol is another beast entirely. Cryptic radio messages, garbled terminal messages, and a focus on back-tracking make for an at-times confusing experience. That said, the game rocks and I’m hoping that sharing some of my own learnings can help others get into the game more deeply (and hopefully inspire more people to check it out!). I’m including a link to the Steam page on all of these posts so anyone who wants to check it out can do so easily.
As a general note, I have not completed Zone Patrol’s main quest yet. So it’s entirely possible that I’ll miss a few side-quests, Codex entries, etc. Think of this less as a straight guide and more as a long-form write-up of the Zone Patrol experience. To that end I’ll be sticking to more of a narrative style than a straight “do this, then do this to advance to the next level.” I’ll be calling out spoilers (primarily keypad codes and item locations) where possible and nesting them under a drop-down like so:
You've been spoiled.
Let’s talk structure!
Vakt’s Ship-Board Armory
In Zone Patrol, you play as Sergent Lexi Abrams, a conscript working for the Vakt PMC. You’ve been hired by a Shadow Client to investigate the Exclusion Zone on the planet ADACA, searching for relics and digging through the remnants left behind by the Savlo corporation.
Zone Patrol is largely an undirected experience - you’ll be handed a general objective, dropped on the planet in an area known as Beach Head, and left to your own devices. As you stumble across new areas and uncover the planet’s secrets you’ll periodically be offered new missions on-onboard the Vakt ship. These more linear objectives offer a break from the core gameplay loop of wandering, looting, and shooting, typically in the form of an all-out assault on a given location or zone defense of a fixed objective.
Area Defense
Aside from these missions, your goals are simple: learn more about the Exclusion Zone, find Artifacts to buy better gear, and don’t die. Instead of scripted encounters, enemies typically spawn in faction-based groups. Notably, this happens both when you enter a new area and over the course of your time in that area - sitting still doesn’t mean you’re safe. It’s also not uncommon to find two or more groups engaged in a shoot-out.
Area Map
Presented in no particular order, here are the game’s 15 zones:
Let’s see how far we get! I’ll update this post with links to each part of the overall guide as I finish them.
