YMMV / Rebuild

• Better Off Sold: Lower-end equipment like sticks and megaphones are best used as this when you have access to better equipment. A lot of the lower-end equipment don't even come with a perk to make their minimal stats worth taking.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Children who are born inside your fort and left to be cared for by other people will have their "babysitter" be registered as their parent, not the person who gave birth. At first it seems like an oversight, but then it's easy to realize that the child recognizes their babysitter as their parent since their babysitter was there to care for them. Makes you wanna keep families together, eh?
  • Even if a bridge gets demolished, a Rubble tile replaces it, allowing people and zombies to still cross rivers. The bridges were probably big enough to form enough rubble to still walk across!
• Fridge Horror:
  • Gangs of Deadsville provides Multiple Endings for the newly-added, story-driven Campaign Mode. The "blow it all up" ending is done specifically to not only get revenge on the Government, but to prevent the Omega-Virus from spreading outside the city... which would be all well and good for a Bittersweet Ending so long as one doesn't stop and realize that they first created *and* distributed the Omega-Virus in Abbotsford beforehand... to that entire city...
  • In the Golden Ending, the world is saved and soon most of the zombies beyond saving die out... And the Rotten zombies who were still conscious were cured! So yay for everybody. But one has to remember that there were Rotten survivors like Two-Arms Reginald who are missing chunks of skin and even entire sections of their bodies. What became of them? Were they accepted into human society or driven away due to fear that they'd go feral?
• Funny Moments:
  • There will be occasions when one of your soldiers/scavengers is cornered by zombies and has to choose between jumping off the roof or fighting through the horde. The former is preferable though as something ends up breaking your fall: your legs.
  • One map has skill checks based on your various survivor's skills. Here's failing the test of intellect.
    Lenka came up with a few different ideas for how to test if the gasoline would still work... She decided to test the lot by lighting samples of it on fire. On the bright side, our medics now have more experience treating second degree burns.
  • Most of the alliance-building in this game is very tongue-in-cheek. Your characters really show that they don't understand nor care to understand the various factions' philosophies, and more or less treat the whole thing like they're trying to be initiated into some club.
  • Fighting factions, while generally not that funny, will have its moments. One of your members can lose a chunk of their knee due to a nail bomb, with your journal writer wondering if it can grow back.
  • The Rotten sometimes trigger a morale-boosting event when you're friendly enough with them. One of them has them putting on a Shakespearean play with a few twists. Namely, they had Caesar get back up and beat the tar out of Brutus, with the knife still in him.
  • The L33tcrew's alliance meeting will have Daria ride in on a longboard to shout "Hack the Planet!", before relying exclusively on gamer slang for her Rousing Speech. Your character is genuinely unsure of what half she's saying as a result, but end the journal entry saying "Alliance FTW".
  • The L33tcrew will sometimes ask that you help them scavenge someplace. When you arrive to clear the zed from the area, your options are to use a "ranged attack" (-2 Ammo), a melee attack, or Fireball! If you use a ranged attack, the L33tcrew will hide behind you and let you use up your bullets. If you choose "Fireball!", you end up burning the eyebrows off of a L33tcrew member, to hilarious effect. You can even tell Dara to screw off and keep all the loot at the end. You'll still gain respect with her, despite this exchange:
  Dara: Awww. You totally ninja'd the loot! No fair!
  • The descriptions for some buildings are hilarious:
    • Fire Department: Well, I'm not on fire, so it must be working. (It does actually work when there is a fire in your fort.)
    • Clothing Store: Trashy, revealing clothing for your darling angel teenage daughter.
    • Church: Our churches are multi-faith spiritual centers. Now offering over a dozen afterlives to go to when you die!
    • Hospital: Survivors heal faster in here, either because of the placebo effect or because once you're in you'll do anything to get out.
    • Laboratory: Here our engineers can research everything from zombie behavior to how they used to get the caramel into those Caramilk bars.
    • Mall: People used to spend hours aimlessly shuffling around these temples of commerce. Nothing's changed, eh?
    • Pawn Shop: They've got enough used instruments in there to start an orchestra. I call trombone!
    • The Ocean: Zed can't swim, they sorta just bob helplessly in place. They can't dance either, but that doesn't come up as often.
  • Sometimes, when a survivor is injured on a zombie-killing mission with 2 or more people, the journal entry will state that a small dog made the injured trip and twist their ankle, before running off to go bark at the zombies. The uninjured survivor hopes that they ate it.

• Game-Breaker: Religion-based gameplay styles in Gangs of Deadsville allow for what is essentially a religion-based society that will almost never lose happiness. Survivors will spread their Devout perk to other survivors and Leaders with the Preacher perk add to the bonuses that churches give. And if your PC is a Priest, then be prepared for an absolutely broken game where the only risks to your fort's happiness are survivors becoming Cultists.
• Good Bad Bugs: It's possible to obtain more than one named sword from the Banshee event by having your survivors go on separate tiles for the mission.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Christian-gun-nut-bikers, The Last Judgement Gang, invites you to a sermon on "God's flaming sword of justice, the AR-15." Seems like patent absurdism, until such a church ceremony actually happened in real life.
• Heartwarming Moments: Sometimes, when hiring Gustav's Love Caravan for the rest of your fort (without your PC taking part), it's shown that a good chunk of your survivors don't even use the opportunity to get it on; the inhabitants of the trailers are all shown to be fast asleep in each others' arms. A lot of folks in your fort just wanted someone to hold them!
  • Some of the Leader Perk events can be incredibly heartwarming. Of note is the Wenatchee event which if the player chooses correctly, ends with the Luddies adopting most of the St. Michael's Boys faction. Ludd Owen (the Luddie head) adopts Rufus (the St. Michael's leader) who comes to view him as a father, replacing his real father who had tragically died.
  • You can hold weddings under a tree whenever two survivors want to get hitched. While it may not be as glamorous as, say, allowing them to throw a wild party, it's stated that the exchanging of vows uplifts your whole fort's spirits.
  • The player character can seek out their own Love Interest, and unlike with other cases described above, the player can go on dates with their L.I. before seeking out marriage. One in particular stands out:
  We grabbed some food from the communal cantina (cornmeal gruel... again) and ate it back at my place. It's wonderful to spend time with [Name]... it doesn't really matter what we do, to be honest. Just hanging out and killing time suddenly has all this meaning when [s/he]'s around.
• Min Maxers Delight: Items with perks attached to them, such as the Pitchfork, the Crossbow, the Feynman Lectures, and the named swords. When you equip any of these items, the perk is registered as being on your survivor, meaning that it disappears from the list of perks that are available via backstory, thus opening up a slot to pick a perk that's marginally more useful.
  • On top of the above, you can alter your survivors' backstories by simply changing their name, provided you haven't started the backstory yet. Once you learn which perks are attached to which backstory tree, it becomes quick work to determine the best route to take for this.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Last Judgement Gang soar past the line of no return by abusing their captives.
  • In 2 and 3, the Pig Farmers are heavily implied (increasingly so as time goes on) to deal exclusively in long pig.
  • The Government aims to conquer all of North America by creating Elite Zombie super soldiers.
  • Gustav is clearly very willing to hire children in his love caravan, and even market them to look as young and childish as possible to cater to pedophiles, up to and including conditioning children to happily fill that role.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: A lot of events are written in multiple variations, but this doesn't really affect varying routes to take on the situation, so once one has a grasp on the general situation, it's easy to just rapidly click the options you want to take without reading any of the entries.
• Squick: In Gangs of Deadsville, your Rotten survivors can become enamored with your normal survivors. While that by itself is at least stomach-able, the squick aspect comes into play when they give birth to a child.
  • Gustav has one girl in his love caravan named "Kitty," who is clearly a child no older than 14, and plays up her appearance by wearing her head in pigtails and clasping a teddy bear.
• That One Level: The Trail map in Rebuild 3 is incredibly difficult even if it seems easy - it's a small map with lots of farms. But none of the squares are woods and there's no good way to get any resource that's not food as sole faction you trade with only offers food. The only way to get resources is scavenging (made difficult by the small map) or trading with Gustav. There are only two ways to win - build the biplane or conquer or ally with the Pig Farmers. But building the biplane is made difficult by needing large amounts of limited resources and survivors constantly beg to leave, forcing you to make a choice between leaving your carefully built team or risk losing resources when survivors get angry and sabotage you. Conquering the Pig Farmers is made difficult by the hordes of zombies constantly attacking you. Trail breaks the mold of previous levels and can be a nasty wake up call to the player
• Tear Jerker
  • Oftentimes, in Rebuild 2's Survivalist Edition, you would be warned that the "strange meat" you're eating is probably people. With winter preventing the farms from producing any food, it drives a lot of players to desperation to do it. At some points, the meat vendor will stop showing up, pushing the player to truly resort to desperate means. Sometimes, the after-action report reveals something terrible. One of the would-be meals woke up during before you can manage to butcher them and they started begging for their life. This was all for naught as one of your men will bludgeon them to death. What You Are in the Dark, indeed.
  • In Gangs of Deadsville, the Helicopter Crash event's first paragraph is fairly depressing:
  We just spotted a transport helicopter flying above [Town's name]'s skyline like some sort of camo-colored angel coming to lift us out of this nightmare. And then it sputtered, spiraled, and came crashing down to earth just like all of our dreams.
  • Diane will always die after the first city, long before you run into her runaway son. You never get to tell him what happened to her.
  • The "I Remember You" event. A survivor will sometimes see a familiar-looking zombie outside the wall, and break down, unsure of what to do about the situation. There's no happy ending to this sort of event; the best outcome is nothing happening by choosing to leave the zombie be, though even that has a small chance of a morale loss.
  • In Vancouver, it's easy to feel a constant sense of hopelessness at the situation: you're fighting against the possibly most powerful faction in the entire continent, you and your fort are infected with the zombie virus on steroids, going mad and having fits of rage, and the other 10 factions all either hate you and want to kill you or are also slowly going mad from the Omega-virus. It's easy to start wanting to let Tears of Joy out when Jesse rolls into town to help you get the real cure.
• That One Boss: In Gangs of Deadsville, Cultists are the most annoying faction to deal with. Whenever you meet the Cultist faction, one of your survivors is granted the Cultist perk. Subsequent events with the Cultist faction will cause more people to gain the perk and a survivor with the Cultist perk will spread the perk if they're in the same team. The problem is that Cultists have a chance of sacrificing themselves to zombies which means any Cultist in your fort could just randomly die. Worst case scenario, one of your dream team gains the perk often forcing a Save Scum. Most players will isolate their Cultists and wipe the faction out entirely in order to avoid dealing with them.