Backlog Beatdown: Killing Zombies with ZombiU

ZombiU is a game I’ve had for a while, played for a bit and never got past the first few parts. I came back to it a couple of weeks ago and after having some difficulty getting started, I managed to beat it last Thursday with an unexpected day off work. Let’s see how it worked out:

ZombiU was one of the WiiU’s launch titles. First person Survival Horror games are nothing new, and ZombiU doesn’t do anything different with the theme. The notable differences are: It’s set in London, it makes use of the WiiU controller, and there are Rogue-like elements.

They'll drive you batty...

The London setting works; it is familiar to me as I am from the UK, but only in an aesthetic sense as I don’t live anywhere near London and even if I did, I don’t know enough about the interiors of Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London (two of the game’s key locations) to make a comparison. Neither, I suspect, do the developers, who appear to recognise London and its people as overblown caricatures, and presumably have never been inside Buckingham Palace either, as from what I understand about the place you don’t just ‘go in.’

The WiiU touch pad contributes to certain aspects of the game, like aiming some of the heavier guns, adding and removing barricades, and inventory management. The latter is where it helps the most; you can add and remove items from your inventory with tablet-like functionality, and it can be used as extra buttons to select your weapons and equipment in real-time, rather than having to pause the game.

The Rogue-like elements come in to play when your character dies. You respawn as a different character, with limited weapons and equipped with whatever you stored at your safe house. The game itself doesn’t change; nothing you killed during your previous run will respawn, except that your previous character is now a Zombie. You need to kill them to reach the equipment that they had; if your new character dies before you manage this, that equipment is gone forever and late in the game, that’s a nasty business indeed.

The game took a while to get going but I enjoyed it once it did. You’re guided by a disembodied northern voice called “The Prepper,” through the speaker on the WiiU controller. He initially teaches you the skills you need to survive. Later in the game you find yourself at odds with him as other people turn up and give you things to do, as Prepper seems to think there is no point in trying to escape the city; he tells you that your only chance is to survive. But, as is often the case, things are never as they seem...

So this turned out to be a thing.
Not a nice moment of the game!

The game is challenging, thrilling and scary in the right places. There’s just the right amount of “panic” moments where you find yourself unexpectedly surrounded by zombies, and some well-paced jump-scares. There’s some optional world-building documents to collect, but you’re not obliged to read them to progress. The campaign rewards a careful, methodical approach to progression, and punishes over-confident hubris. The controls can be fiddly, but I believe it better represents the ‘everyman’ survivors you’re playing. However some of the dialogue requires some suspension of disbelief to accommodate the different survivors. For example, there is a section where you fetch an item for a doctor. You’ll probably have died several times by the time you return– but he talks as though he recognises you and makes no mention you being a different person!

I beat the game, but there’s a post-credits sequence that determines the ending. To get the better ending you need to escape the city via helicopter, but as you make your way there, you’re surrounded by zombies that respawn for the only time in the game. I didn’t beat this; I didn’t have enough firepower left to deal with the zombies effectively, and I’d forgotten which way I was supposed to go and ran in to fire. There is a Survivor mode – where you have to beat the entire game with one survivor – and some multiplayer modes. I haven’t looked at these yet, but they’re there if I need them!

Backlog Beatdown: Plants vs Zombies: A Zombie Game that I Really Liked...

You guessed it; this was another Xbox Live Arcade download. Quite a recent one, as it happens. Plants vs Zombies is a game that managed to get very popular, spawn a number of sequels, a host of clones and is quite well regarded in the world of videogames. And yet, it managed to slip almost completely under my radar. I started playing it at a time where I was playing through the original Baldur’s Gate and wanted something to break up the pace of computer role-playing games; games that you can just pick up and play are valuable things indeed in the wake of all that!

I’ve really enjoyed my time with the game. The premise is simple: Zombies are crossing your lawn and you have to plant various kinds of flora that will stop them. You generate your resources from sunlight and certain kinds of plants. Some plants to direct damage to the zombies, some have other effects such as freezing them or slowing them down for a few moments. Some plants function entirely defensively, blocking zombie attacks from the front or the top. You also have single use plants that take out a number of zombies at a time. The trick is picking the right plant for the right job!

The Zombies have different types as well. There are the regular run-of-the-mill zombies who don’t put up much of a fight, but things get interesting when the different zombies are introduced. Some wear armour (in the form of a traffic cone or a bucket on their head!) and take a lot longer to kill. Some of them have spears, ladders and pogo sticks that can jump over a number of your plants; usually only the first but you need to make sure the pogo zombie dies before he jumps over all of them! Some have slow-moving vehicles, some tunnel under your defences and attack the other way.

Thankfully, this game doesn't take itself too seriously...

But the genius of the game is about how you plan your planting in relation to what you know is coming. Before each level begins, you get a brief view of the level’s zombies and then choose from 6 of your available plants to make available to plant. Generally, it’s good to have a balance of resource generation, firepower and status effects, and the best ones to take are the ones that have been introduced on that level, but you get to know which work well and which don’t. Also, the plants have different costs; some plants do a lot of damage but will cost a lot of sunlight (the game’s principle resource) so you won’t be able to plant many until you have the infrastructure to support them. And there are new mechanics being introduced on almost every level, so there’s always something different to do.

The game is challenging but not insurmountably difficult. If one of the Zombies eats his way past all your defences then you lose, but in most cases there is a ‘lawnmower’ there acting as a last line of defence that kills all the zombies on that line. There are a couple of times when you’ll lose, because of a new zombie type you didn’t know how to deal with, or a huge wave of zombies you weren’t anticipating, but you can always attempt the level again thinking ‘just one more go.’

You’d think this would all get old after a while, and the game is better enjoyed in short bursts, but you’d be surprised how much variety you can put into a game like this. There are ‘conveyer belt’ levels, where instead of picking your plants you get a selection of plants on a conveyer belt and have to build your garden around that. The game ends in a ‘boss’ level that works in this manner. There’s even a bowling stage!

All in all Plants vs Zombies is a very good and well-designed game, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. There’s plenty more to do in the game but I really want to get some more games finished so I’ll probably come back to the other game modes at a later date, to bring my achievement points up a little higher!

No Game New Year: Down and Depressed with Deadlight

Deadlight is another Xbox Live Games with Gold download. Zombie Apocalypse games are nothing new, but I hadn’t played one in a 2D side-scrolling platform game before and I thought it would be interesting to see this take on it.

I set myself a different challenge this time: Get through the game without looking at any of the achievement trophies. This is because I’ve ruined games before by playing them and looking for the achievement points; they’re nice to get, and I won’t usually get rid of a game until I’ve got all that are possible, but they take away some enjoyment of the game if you’re too pedantic about it.

This is the title screen; even the music that
accompanies this is bleak and tragic...

The game puts you in control of Randall Wayne, who’s teamed up with a group of survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse in search of his missing family. At the start of the game you’re separated from the group, and you have to run, jump and fight your way through the horde of Zombies – in this game called Shadows – to reunite with your team and your family. That is, of course, if any have survived…

For those of us who remember the 80s and the 90s, side-scrolling platform games were the standard back then. They lost touch once 3d gaming came in; platforming was quite difficult to pull off accurately in 3d environments and not many games managed it. But they never went away either. In the early 00’s we had emulation. In the mid/late 00’s we had retro-gaming. And in the previous/current generation, they seem to be… not making a comeback; there has been a definite shift in what is considered to be mainstream, but they have a strong presence in the sub-triple-A market.

With this new surge of platform games, some elements have stayed the same across the generations, others have changed. What has remained is art style, in that every platform game worth its code has its own distinctive look and feel to it. And Deadlight is BLEAK. The backgrounds look worn down and hopeless, the character models are barely more than silhouettes and the soundtrack evokes misery and despair. The cut-scenes are graphic novel-style drawings and subtitles that remind me, more than anything else, of Watchmen. It makes you feel that, even if you do get to the end of the game, surviving is as good as it is going to get for your character and anybody fortunate enough last to the end.

See what I mean? Bleak.

What has changed from the old platform games is combat. The combat mechanics of platform games have never been complicated, but in new games, the emphasis seems to be taken away from the combat and put on the exploration and platforming. That works well for Deadlight, which boasts a very small number of enemy types; munching your way through zombie hordes gets old at the best of times and is presumably incredibly dull if you can only do it in two dimensions. In Deadlight, you have an axe, a pistol and a shotgun at the very most, and very limited ammunition for the latter two. You avoid combat as much as possible; aiming is quite tricky and you don’t swing the axe very fast. You can’t take many hits before you die, and you’ll find yourself blaming the clunky controls for the occasional plummet, or a missed shot that costs you the game. It creates a challenge where you have to think about what you’re doing in order to proceed; more satisfying than ‘kill everything in the room then go on to the next bit.’

Yet for all that, I can’t decide whether I enjoyed the game. It’s a great game, no doubt about that. It’s a well presented; if not entirely fresh take on an idea that’s becoming stale now. The art style carries it for the most part, and telling a single story that’s over in a few hours is a refreshing change of pace. But my word, it is depressing. Any sense of achievement you gain from completing the levels and objectives is subsequently crushed by the heavy atmosphere and the feeling that no matter what you do, you’re only delaying the inevitable…

I might go back to this later to look for all the achievement points, but for now I’ll move on to something more cheery.

No Game New Year: Dead Island

Dead Island

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…

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 isn’t really as good as any of the game it references, it’s OK for a while, bashing zombies with Baseball bats, cutting their limbs off with knives and the like. You might even come across a gun or two if you’re lucky. But there are issues in the game that, in retrospect, impede enjoyment of the game quite a lot.

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.

 I’ve stopped playing it for a little while but I expect I will come back to it eventually and get through the rest of the game. I’m about a third of the way through at the moment, but I decided to move on as I always come back from a weekend away from games wanting to play something else.

That turned out to be Virtua Fighter 2 from the previous blog…