Near the end of the 21st Century, aliens from another world, or perhaps even another dimension, arrived on Earth. The Acrin. What did they want? Nobody knows. They served the Voice, and the Voice was unknowable. They passed judgment on humanity, and billions died. Then came ZEPHON. An AI spanning the globe’s information infrastructure, it seized control of the world’s defensive arsenal and, with the perfect coordination available only to a machine, beat back the invaders. In desperation, the Acrin launched the Fulcrum, and the world was shattered. Now, the remnants of humanity struggle to rebuild in the wilderness left by the war. The remnants of the Acrin remain, and the alien ecosystem they’ve brought with them spreads in patches across the world. ZEPHON persists, pursuing its inscrutable goals. Can mankind persist in the shadows of these powers, or will they be ground to dust at last?

This is the setup for ZEPHON, a 4x released in late 2024 by Proxy Studios. I’ve provided more information than they do upfront, simply because there’s no way to discuss the game without more context. In ZEPHON, players are tasked with the typical 4x goals–eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate–in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi/cosmic horror setting. This means building new cities, mustering armies, and facing off against foes. But ZEPHON distinguishes itself from the rest of a crowded field by dint of its unusual mechanics and focus on storytelling.

At the gameplay level, ZEPHON is a combat-focused 4x title. Unlike games like Civilization or the Endless series, players don’t have multiple routes to victory: it always comes down to warfare, and city management and diplomacy, while present, are ultimately in service of conquest. To facilitate this, ZEPHON has a number of changes from the typical 4x format. The most obvious is that unit production buildings provide an addtional queue for cities. In Civ, building a barracks simply means that your units will get more XP upon recruitment; the city can still only build one thing at a time, whether it’s a unit or a building or something else. In ZEPHON, building a barracks means that the city now has a queue for infantry separate from its queue for buildings. Even at maximum production, it still takes awhile to train units, and additional copies of a building only provide numerical bonuses, not an additional queue, so ZEPHON is not simply slightly slowed down StarCraft where the player is expected to always be producing units, but building an army is given preference to a degree that is unusual in 4x titles.

In terms of combat itself, it is a one-unit-per-tile affair. Positioning units to take advantage of various buffs or terrain advantages is important, but at the end of the day the most important skill is in responding to the frontline and being able to shift units around to keep it from crumbling. Units deal damage based on how many entities are in the unit (so an upgrade that increases the number of soldiers in a unit from five to six represents a 20% increase in power at max health), which means that single-entity units have the advantage of never becoming weaker as they lose health. Units can have multiple weapons, often unlocked via the tech tree, that not only increase their damage output but can impact their effective ranges. There’s a lot of customization to be had in unlocking new capabilities, from passive bonuses to activated abilities. The AI is reasonably good, though whether it’s because it is actually smart or because the system is relatively straightforward enough that as long as they are cranking out units they can put up a fight is unclear.

To further incentivize military buildup, the wasteland of ZEPHON is crawling with neutral foes. Analogous to barbarians in Civ or the creeps of Warcraft III, these enemies make exploring the map dangerous and slow for all factions. You’ll need to build up forces just to claim resources, and combat rarely ceases even when you’re not at war.

Advancing up the tech tree also involves tough choices. Techs are divided into tiers, and to access a new tier, three technologies from the previous tier must be researched. This has become fairly common in 4x games, and ZEPHON suffers from the usual problem that some techs are so essential that you would never skip them. But even with that caveat, getting access to the higher tiers can be so essential that it is difficult to justify hanging out in lower tiers longer than you have to. If a lower tier tech you ignored proves desirable later, it’s usually better to go back and pick it up later (with the benefit of more research capability dramatically reducing the time to unlock it) than to sacrifice reaching essential higher tier techs. This levels off towards the end of the tech tree, when you start focusing mostly on specific high-tier units and upgrades while ignoring inessential techs.

“Slow and arduous” seems to have been an important point for Proxy Studios. City management is another area where the game does not flow as smoothly as its peers. Cities must claim hexes to build anything. Each hex on the map contains a number of slots, and each slot can contain one building. If you want to build a barracks, for example, you’ll need to have an open slot in one of your hexes to build it. Claiming a new hex occupies the city’s primary build queue, so you won’t be building anything while claiming a new hex. Each building also requires a unit of population to work at full capacity; if you don’t have enough citizens to staff all your buildings, you’ll suffer severe output penalties. Each citizen lowers the loyalty of your city, however, and if your loyalty is negative, you’ll also suffer output penalties. All of these considerations make city management a juggling act of opportunity costs and tradeoffs. Building another city is also not an easy solution. You’ll need engineers, who aren’t unlocked until midway through the tech tree, and each new city imposes a global -6 to Loyalty. Getting a second city up and running is a huge boon but a huge undertaking. Getting a third city that isn’t a net drag on your progress is very difficult.

All of this could be very annoying, but it all feeds into ZEPHON’s laser-like focus on its narrative and theme. This is a game about rebuilding following an apocalypse, and everything feeds into that. The world is hostile. Building up your armies and infrastructure is slow and difficult. And everywhere you turn, the game is dripping with flavor. You don’t pick a faction, you pick a leader, each of whom is presented as an archetype, and each of whom has their own personal narrative reflected in special missions and unique technologies. The Fallen Soldier was killed in battle, but came back to life, animated by some strange alien force. His soldiers carry around a piece of his ever-regenerating flesh, and this binds them to him. The Practical Romantic inspires his people to believe that life can be better, even as he manipulates them and drives them to do dark deeds that are necessary simply to survive. Each leader is distinct, with an affinity for one of the three branches of development.

Those branches are another avenue for storytelling. Units and technologies in ZEPHON fall into three categories: Human, Voice, and Cyber. Human units and techs are fairly standard: soldiers, medics, bombers, etc., veering only occasionally into James Cameron-esque grounded sci-fi tech. The Voice is pure cosmic horror, offering Silent Hill-esque monstrosities and alien biotech. Cyber allows you to pursue your cyberpunk dreams, with AI killing machines and cyborgs aplenty. Each leader has an affinity for one of these three categories, granting them access to the associated technologies one tier earlier in the research tree. There is no penalty for mixing and matching, and players can build their forces however they like.

Beyond the moment-to-moment gameplay, ZEPHON is structured around its narrative. The Acrin remnants, led by the melancholy Anchorite, exists on the map as a powerful NPC faction, as does the inscrutable ZEPHON itself and the Mad Max-ian Chieftess. Eventually, based on the settings configured when making the game, the Anchorite and ZEPHON will go to war with giant monsters. When this happens, every faction in the game, including the player, makes a choice: side with one of these two powers or remain independent. Siding with one requires you to keep at least one of your allied kaiju alive while destroying all of the enemy’s, while remaining independent demands that you kill all of the kaiju. This climactic moment is a bit like the infamous Realm Split of Total War: Shogun II, breaking alliances apart and forcing the player into a massive war that may be unwinnable if they haven’t been preparing for it. But this focuses the combat nicely, allowing the game to end on a note of full-scale war without the tedium that often comes from massive 4x conflicts.

Unfortunately, ZEPHON is not without its flaws. The relentless focus on combat leading up to a single event makes most campaigns fairly samey, even when picking new leaders and trying out new units. That there are no real synergies between Human, Voice, and Cyber techs make experimenting feel a bit limited, though you can find some interesting army compositions by pairing units across the affinities. Diplomacy is flavorful but limited, and even maintaining good relations for the whole game with a faction may mean nothing once the final battle begins.

But all of these things don’t feel like an impediment to recommending ZEPHON to 4x fans. It is fundamentally enjoyable to play, with a distinct mechanical identity and a high level of polish. It also simply oozes personality, with subtle jokes punctuating the potentially suffocating grimdark post-apocalyptic vibes. In this way, it is reminiscent of classic 4x Alpha Centauri, though it is doing a lot of different things than that game. Throw in unlockable “mutators” that allow players to modify core rules of the game, the promise of more content to come, and a modest $40 price tag, and ZEPHON starts to look more and more like a cult classic in the making.

A NOTE: While this review is about ZEPHON, most of what I wrote also applies to the developers’ earlier title, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius: Relics of War. That earlier game has much the same mechanics, minus diplomacy, and substitutes the Warhammer 40k license for a custom setting. ZEPHON is, in my view, the much better game, with higher production values, more personality, and a better sense of how to prevent the game from bogging down. But if you like the sound of ZEPHON, Gladius is something of a prototype and may appeal to you, as well.