Drive by comment: I read all of Apocalypse no Toride (Fortress of the Apocalypse).
Rating? 5/10
It started out really strong with interesting characters, a good setting, and some standard zombie action. The art is a little rough for the first five or six chapters, but things eventually start evening out. I wasn't really a fan of the zombie design from beginning to end. Honestly, by the end, it was super reminiscent of Gantz for me in design, but it's been so long since I've read the latter, I can't be totally certain as to why. That aside, the art was pretty okay. Not the best your eyes will witness, but by the dog zombie things, the style seems to be figured out.
The story had a good start, but by the end, so many plot lines have just been abandoned, it's kind of ridiculous. It doesn't help that the ending was incredibly rushed, as if the author got bored, didn't know what to do with the story anymore, and kind of gave up, just wrapping everything up summarily over the course of about five chapters of almost pure nonsense. They attempt to explain the virus but never get beyond a super rudimentary explanation that amounts to "it's a virus bruh", another plot point that appeared to be making progress and was simply given up on.
Characters are introduced and forgotten, the running death count just sort of stops existing in the last ten chapters or so, and the author seemed scared to kill off main characters despite the potential impact. The amount of plot armor after obvious death flags gets a little ridiculous.
To pull it all together, apparently the story came to be because the incredibly vague idea of a prison story with zombies was pitched to the author. With that in mind, it isn't too surprising it fell to pieces when the biggest motivation was "it sounded cool".
To be totally fair to Apocalypse no Toride, there were some really cool moments, and the main characters were diverse enough to be decently well written considering how two dimensional the characters ultimately were and how predictable the bits and pieces of character development ended up being. In the end though, the handful of well done pieces couldn't save the whole.
Final verdict? Not recommended unless you really need a zombie fix. It's only 46 chapters of the slightly longer variety, but nothing someone couldn't get through in a few hours over a couple of days. Anybody seeking a plot with substance and explanation is better off going elsewhere though.
