There aren't many better zombie game choices, so you might as well try this one.
+ Its running on the Unreal engine, so it can be modded very easily.
+ Multiplayer is quite imaginitive.
+ It can be mildly fun once in a blue moon.
- Lame zombie action.
- Disgusting lack of Bump Mapping.
- A.I. is more like Ain't.
- Weak structure to it all.
- Its not scary (save for the occasional zombie mumbling in the dark)
---
When I saw this game for the first time in gamespot's search engine, I was puzzled. I am a diehard zombie fan, and here is this 2005 zombie game, made in the time of Bioshock and Doom 3, receiving overwhelmingly negitive reviews all around. I ignored the reviews. I got this game because I liked the movie of the same name, the survival aspect, and just plain zombie killing fun. But something hit me hard. It was the horrible graphics, retard wall-smooching zombies, and just the anti-natural gameplay of smacking zombies across the screen. "This isn't it", I thought. This is just a disapointment at short. At large, I'll continue, but you should be advised that Land of the Dead is not GOTY material.
Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green is based upon a decent movie of the same name. Y'know, that awesome movie by George that featured millions of flesh eating zombies overrunning the streets of New York. Umm...well, something went wrong with the movie-to-game translation. Everything, actually.
All us who've seen the movie hunger for supernatural horror shots and madness, but the game's presentation of the story from the movie just barely skews flat. The main character is a skraggy hillbilly bumpkin by the name of Jack who lives on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. While eating a plate of what appears to be meat loaf, the light in his living room flickers out. Twack! Jack picks up the phone, but it's dead. Damn! He looks out the window and sees a bloody person by his front door. Hrmph! When Jack tries to greet him, the bloody person turns out to be a flesh-eating zombie! Gazooks! Jack runs upstairs to grab his rifle from his attic. Hurry! But when he comes back down, his farm is covered with those zombies! Holy Shibierwaztie-de'la-dee-dozo! Looks like Jack is alone in fighting the zombie horde. The game is divided level by level through cutscenes of Jack trying to figure out what is going on, all of which look pretty bland and uninspired. You stalk through a cornfield, a burning hospitol, a sewer, a warehouse, a movie theater, and in the streets of New York. In the game you walk slowly, because Jack can only sprint for 5 seconds, and you pick up weapons and supplies while killing the dead. You don't get points, health, or ammo for killing zombies, so its best to just walk straight to the exit. And then the level's done.
How is that kind of gameplay bad when many shooters follow the same pattern? Because, not only is the action and combat run-of-the-mill, the zombies in Land of the Dead are stupid. No, not like falling over objects or things like that. I mean, the A.I. in Land of the Dead is just actrocious. Most, if not, all zombie hordes travel in armies and roam the streets mercilessly. Instead, the game tosses only 2 or 3 zombies at you at a given time. Unless you are foolish enough to round up 9 zombies to corner you inside a building, you are almost never surrounded or cut off, so all you need to do is shoot, backpedal, and reload. The zombies do have some interesting behavior patterns: they bust down doors and feed on nearby corpses (including yours). But if you walk up to the zombies while they're swinging their claws at you, suddenly, they will become rooted in place and forget who they are attacking. Subsequently, you can just shoot them in the face with your shotgun or axe, and they'll backflip into a ragdoll, flop around on the ground a bit, and die. Its incredibly lame, just tip-toeing on the lines of a rediculous 'hee-haws gone wild' shooter. Its almost hilarious and fits the bill for the kitsch factor if the game demanded it. Sadly, I don't think it does.
Land of the Dead tries its best to be a survival horror game, and it does well in some parts. For instance, you can only hold as much ammo as your pocket can carry, so you're often left trying to find weapons like axes, crowbars, golf clubs, and the like. Trouble is, these weapons suck. The horrible A.I. itself isn't something to fear, but the zombies can withstand so much damage its not even alternitively realistic. Now I don't know how strong a zombie is, but I'm sure 5 shotgun blasts would be more than enough to take it down. But in Land of the Dead, all of the weapons except for the rocket launcher and grenades are worthless. Bullets snuggle into your enemies more than they ram into them; I am not lying that the shells of the Shotgun go right through the zombies, and when you find yourself axing the same zombie 10 times without killing him, you'll chalk Land of the Dead up as being one of the worst hit-dectection game's ever. More annoying is the wind-up and charge-up time that it takes to swing a melee weapon. When you press the primary fire, you'd expect Jack to swing a crowbar instantly. But he doesn't. Instead, he gently pats the crowbar a couple times, then slowly raises it up, and then axe-handles it downward super-fast. If you have a hammer, he takes his dear time to slowly flip it over to its claw side and merely pokes the zombie in front of him, then flips it back. EVERY TIME HE ATTACKS. It's not even funny, it's just plain dumb.
For this reason and many others, Land of the Dead is a hard and annoying game to play. My copy of the game did not ship with a difficulty selection, and I died quite a lot in the game thanks to the seemingly immortal zombies. But frankly, the lack of a save system leaves way too much to be desired, and needed. Well, technically there IS a save system. The text "Auto-saving" appears at the top of the screen once in a blue moon, and you can save your game anytime while playing. But if you die and look for a saved game to load, it won't be there. Not even the Auto-save! The campaign has more than 10 levels, each lasting about 10 minutes, and you have to beat them all in one go. It's an outrage!
Land of the Dead is probably the worst Unreal-powered game there is. Yes, you heard me right; the game runs on the Unreal engine. Just look at the screenshots of the game. That's what the game looks like maxed out. And it looks pretty bad in 2005. Walls look muddy, blood looks like cherry juice, and there is no sense of horror in the kill-box level design (unless you count the looping piano music and occasional zombie groaning). The bump-mapping is almost non-exsistant for any of the textures in the entire game, so its like Half-Life 2 at the lowest texture setting and possibly worse. The character models, like Jack himself, and other zombies actually look really good, but with Jack being pretty much the only human ever seen in the game, and the stupid zombies humping the wall, you couldn't hate more. On my system, there was also a short but freaquent lag every "sequence" when a few zombies were being loaded up.
Land of the Dead has a multiplayer mode that supports Internet and Lan. Suprisingly, multiplayer is pretty fun in Land of the Dead, and so it keeps it from becoming a 1.0 (also because of my healthy novelty towards zombies). You can duke it out through deathmatch, trying to frag your way above other players without getting eaten alive in zombie-infested maps. You can also play the abysmal levels in the campaign with friends in co-op (assuming you would want to do such a thing?) and survive for as long as you can in a wave-after-wave arena death pit. Almost all of the player models are clones of Jack, but you can still customize your appearence with tatoos and camo-paint. Furthermore, the game can be modded with an SDK included in a patch, and along with that patch includes the grand UnrealEd. No, its not the best editor on the planet, but it still lets you create some interesting maps for either multiplayer or co-op. So you can make your own zombie (would-be) appocalypse, littering the area with survival weapons and supplies of your choice, and twist it into a Left 4 Dead clone. I have faith that you would create a much better singleplayer campaign than Groove Games.
Because I give up on this one. Its just bland. Its just not scary. And worse yet, it just sucks flat! If you want to try it, you can. The game's probably up for download for freeware, and frankly, it deserves no more. Land of the Dead is a mildly fun but disapointing Unreal game, and although it does have some good parts, you need not to expect much. Most people might review the game negitavely merely because of the bad A.I.. I'm rating it low because of it's slow pace, unsatifiying combat, and rather painful difficulty. But then, decent multiplayer, kitsch factor, and survival concepts boot it back up to 6.0. Its worth playing, but only if you just 'happen' to stumble upon it.