Because of my usual problems with time allowance, this blog
will be more of a review of ZombiU. I started it last week and, continuing on
this week, I’m finding it tough to play – sadly not for the right reasons.
I’ve been spoiled over the last ten years or so by Autosave,
where I expect a game to save itself every so often so that I don’t have to do
the last half an hour again if I lose during the game. ZombiU works differently
to this. When your survivor dies, you carry on from the same point in the
progress of the game with a different survivor; functionally identical but a
different person. The problem is that the game doesn’t save when this happens.
To save the game you have to sleep in the safe house. I didn’t know this, and
lost all the progress I’d made on Monday through forgetting to save the game.
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| A cricket bat. Could it be more British? Good for conserving ammo but it takes a lot of hits to drop a Zombie... |
“No problem,” thought I, “I wasn’t doing very well, let’s
start again.” I got to the point early on in the game where you have to go to
the supermarket and hack the security camera junction boxes. I died a number of
times – usually as I’d managed to traverse to a different area. When I’d
finally finished what I was supposed to be doing, I headed back to the safe
house, to find that the game had glitched and hadn’t registered that I’d made
it to the supermarket. This was a requirement to end the mission, and because
it hadn’t registered, the game would never progress beyond that point. I could
have started again, but I was tired and went to bed instead.
The game itself plays OK. The handling’s a bit off but I’m
choosing to believe that it better represents the relative skill of the
‘everyman’ survivors you’re controlling. The best – and simultaneously the
worst – bits are where there were more zombies in the area than you were
expecting, or you trigger a trap, and you have to make a quick blind decision
as to where to go next. You can barely see, you’re panicking and the chances
that you’ll get it right are slim indeed. You’ll probably die at these points,
and it can feel quite cheap. On the other hand if I was caught up in a Zombie
Apocalypse that’s probably what would happen to me!
The WiiU game pad works better in some situations than
others. It’s good for inventory management; touch screens are ideal for those
situations. I also liked it’s utilisation for things like opening sewer drains,
or setting and removing barricades; that’s representative of at least some of
the physical effort required by your character to do those things. It reminded
me of Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for the Nintendo DS, essentially the first
Resident Evil game that included some added bits of touch screen functionality.
Less welcome are those times where you have to use it to aim
the heavy machine gun near the safe house; you have to aim in first person
using the gyro and the screen on the pad. Those guns should be a challenge to
use. But you hold the pad flat to play the game, and hold it up to your face in
order to aim on the screen with the full range of movement. The trouble is if
the aiming begins while your pad’s still flat, you’ll hold it up and will be looking
straight at the floor. Even though I later found that you could use the right
analogue stick to correct this, it disrupts the flow of the game!
ZombiU’s OK, but that’s all. I might not through to the end
before moving on!
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| I expect Simeon looks a bit like this... |
At the Roleplaying group we’ve changed games for this
rotation; we’re continuing a Dungeons and Dragons: Greyhawk campaign started a
while back. It’s not a deliberately funny setting, but I’m playing a half-elf
fighter called Simeon D’sai who has a Wisdom score of 6 with a -2 modifier.
This has created very fun situations where my character is easily fooled, both
in the adventure and my colleagues who take advantage of it! It’s been fun so
far, and it should continue to be.
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