Ah, Zombie Games. Of all the gaming tropes that refuse to
die, Zombies – quite fittingly – are the most belligerent. Ever since 1995,
when the first Resident Evil came out and Zombies became scary again, we’ve had
a steadily-increasing horde of Zombie games rising up to consume its own genre
– and infect other genres, that previously had nothing to so with the undead,
as Zombie add-on packs are released for Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption.
Zombie games get yearly releases, new intellectual properties are published
that are basically just Zombies, and recently we’ve been seeing the ways to
kill them become more and more inventive – just to keep the so-called Horror
genre interesting.
You’ll guess from that rather cynical opening that I’m not a
huge fan of Zombie Games. I love the first Resident Evil game, and the fourth
but I’d hardly class that as a Zombie game. I played Nightmare Creatures for a
little while but didn’t get very far. The only other Zombie games I play are
the ones where Zombies appear as part of a line up of enemies, in Role Playing
Games for example. So how did I come to play this one?
You guessed it: Downloaded it off Xbox Live as part of the
Games with Gold package. I wanted to play something I could get through
reasonably quickly, and tearing through a horde of Zombies seemed like the
ideal game to play. Turns out I, er, wasn’t quite right about that…
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| Customisation of weapons is always fun... |
The game is essentially a first person action RPG that
apparently has an emphasis on melee combat. I’ve not heard good things about it
from Youtube videos I’ve seen where it’s been commented on, (To be fair, Zero
Punctuation is hardly the best place to look for positivity,) but as I don’t
play many Zombie games and certainly none of the previous-gen ones, I didn’t
have any pre-conceived ideas of what the game would be like. What I got was a
peculiar mish-mash of different games rolled in to one. “Hey, it’s Borderlands
with Melee Weapons,” I found myself saying at one point. “Hey, it’s Elder
Scrolls in a Contemporary Setting,” I thought at another. “Hey, it’s Far Cry
with Zombies,” I thought finally, the Skyrim with Guns analogy already having
been used by the aforementioned Far Cry. And while Dead Island
The first thing about the game is this: It is not scary. I
know Zombie games are not necessarily scary any more anyway, but here’s the
thing: They should be. The first Resident Evil game worked so well because of
the combination of fixed camera angles, limited ammo and ambiguous health
system. More or less the same goes for the first two Silent Hill games. This
did a fine job of building a huge amount of tension as you struggled to solve
the puzzles in the game in order to move on to the next bit, all the time
pushing your luck with your ammo and your health while you could barely see
what was going on. Combine that with the occasional jump scare and the
possibility that you could de-rail any chance you had of beating the game
through sheer carelessness, and you had a genuinely frightening game. There’s
none of that here. The open environment means that with a very small exception,
you see the monsters long before they have a chance to react to your presence.
The puzzles largely consist of fetch quests, and weapons are easily obtained
and maintained. There’s no survival here. There’s just getting from one bit of
the game to the next and killing Zombies if they happen to get in your way.
The ‘Quests’ are a good idea, but something of a missed mark
in my opinion. For a start they are almost always ‘Fetch’ quests (bring Item A
to Location B, then return to Quest Giver C and receive reward D, plus some
XP.) Thematically they’re all correct – finding supplies, tools and prized
possessions – but its all carrot and no stick. For example, in the first
section of the game, the quests you have to do in order to progress the game
further is attempt to get supplies from various parts of the island. All the
others are side quests – someone asks you to look for a necklace, another asks you
to find family member, a third asks for engine parts for a car. The only reason
it matters what order you do all this in is the reward you get at the end,
which could take the form of money, weapons or supplies. It never seems to
occur to the game that, while you’re faffing about looking for a necklace, the
missing family member is presumably fighting for their lives against Zombies,
and will probably die if you don’t get to them soon. And while you’re doing all
these side quests, how are the survivors coping with the supplies you’ve chosen
not to look for? Do they revolt? Do some of them go scavenging themselves? Do
they snarl at you whenever you’re around for not doing enough to help? No –
they just stand around waiting for you to do it. There could have been an
excellent ‘decision’ mechanic in there where you have to decide what is
important and what isn’t, and come to terms with the fact that you can’t help
everyone which would have fit the theme perfectly, but it just doesn’t happen.
The other missions I’ve done so far are either ‘kill’ missions, where you have
to kill a certain set of enemies – which you’ve been doing all game anyway, so
that’s nothing new – or escort missions, and no one likes them no matter what
game it’s in. There’s not a lot of variety in a game this long to be honest.
Next criticism – the game is quite stoically bleak.
Everybody around you is as miserable as sin and whether you achieve their
quests or not, it does little to lighten the mood. Now, I understand that
there’s not a lot of room for sunshine and rainbows in a Zombie game, but there
really isn’t much personality in any of the NPCs that I’ve met so far. They’re
there for the more functional purpose of giving quests, and while there are
some exceptions, most people just… talk.
The contrast between what people expected having seen the
game trailer and what people eventually got has been well-documented. Having
seen a video of a father and a husband (both the same person) fighting
ferociously to defend his family, and eventually having to throw his
recently-zombiefied daughter out of the window to a huge drop below, what we
were expecting was an emotionally charged desperate battle for survival. The
problem with this approach is that it only really works with a relatively small
cast of characters so that we have time to build up relationships with them and
actually care if they get hurt – and even then, they have to be correctly
scripted and performed. This doesn’t happen much at all in the game I’ve played
up until now, as none of the characters are particularly memorable.
***SPOILER ALERT*** on the one occasion I’ve come across
where the NPCs actually contribute some emotional gravity to the story, it is
so poorly paced you barely notice. A mechanic has been bitten, he knows he does
not have much time left before he becomes a Zombie and promises to upgrade your
vehicle before that happens. You have to fight off a Zombie horde while he does
this, and when the mission is over, you are rewarded with a cut-scene where he
asks you to take his daughter with you. What follows is a teary goodbye between
father and daughter, which would have been a darn sight more effective if you
hadn’t been introduced to both characters LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES AGO. The
‘scene’ is shot well – but because we have no pre-existing emotional attachment
to the characters, we find ourselves caring about them a lot less than we
should. This severely blunts the emotional impact we are supposed to have over
this. ***SPOILER OVER***
That having been said, I’ve been playing through the game
and I have been enjoying it. There have been no standout moments, but also no
appalling incompetence on the part of the devs. It is a playable game, make no
mistake about that, and I have been having fun with it. I especially like the
idea of doing limb damage to enemies in order to prevent them from running or
attacking, and crafting weapons is always a satisfying experience – if you have
enough room for them in your inventory! Driving over Zombies is always fun, and
even though there’s not a massive variety of enemies, you do at least have to
come up with new strategies for when a new one is introduced. And the Looter
gangs are good as well, as they lend a certain amount of moral ambiguity to the
survivors. Finally, some of the sound assets for the Zombies are excellent. One
of them genuinely sounds like they’re in pain when you’re staving their brains
in with the handle of a hammer.
That turned out to be Virtua Fighter 2 from the previous blog…
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