So amazingly horrible, I actually want to play it some more... >.>
I know this because I got a hold of a copy of the game for a few hours and tested a few things out. Honestly, I was pretty excited about this game. One man against an army of zombies as he fights his way to Fiddler's Green. Great, bring on the gore and violence.
The first time I booted up the game I was shown the start menu, selected New Game, and nothing happened. It took me awhile to realize what actually happened: the game froze entirely. Mind you, this game is new out of the plastic wrap it comes in and my Xbox is in great condition. So I booted it up again, selected New Game once more and saw some progress. I watched the loading screen, reading the bits and pieces of advice they give to the player before starting. Then I read some more. And some more. And probably a few more on top of that before the game finally started. Suddenly I'm a guy, standing in what appears to be a living room, looking out at a stranger in the yard. I go get a gun from my attic and was amazed at the .22 I had pulled from a chest up there. It was crazy technicolor. Great. So I restarted once again. I don't want to be stuck playing through this with glitches happening here and there, might as well get a fresh start.
Or not. I sat through the atrocious loading time once again and something different happened: I was treated to an intro movie explaining why somebody is standing in my yard and who I am! That's right, the first time I played this actually didn't show. Why it was absent the first time is beyond me. Thankfully this time when I got my weapon it wasn't technicolor any longer. I blasted my way through some zombies, including the stranger in my yard, and realized that despite the long load time, the map that had loaded was really quite small. There was a house with two stories, attic, and basement, the outside yard surrounded by cornfield, and a small toolshed, and the inside of a small barn that is only visible at the end of the mission. The cutscene at the end of the mission told me that my character had decided to walk through the cornfield to his neighbor's house because he didn't want to experience this disaster alone.
So he decided to walk through the cornfield. Anybody else see anything wrong with this? As it turns out, loading a cornfield takes a long time and features a huge maze of hay bales with ammunition and health packs scattered around the bales. Wonderful. I love mazes filled with zombies. Especially zombies that may as well be immune to the slug of a .22 but explode like water balloons filled with red paint when hit with a "Revolver" bullet. I gave up, honestly, and decided to try some multiplayer.
My roommate and I each had a copy of the game and hooked up the Xbox's via system link. First thing we realize is that there's no real co-op. Whatever. There is, however, Invasion mode, where you and your friends ward off wave after wave of zombies that either magically appear, crawl out of the ground, or fall from the sky. So my roommate selects his character (of which there are only two choices at the time) and I select mine, and I select Join Server to link up to his Xbox and it's not there. In fact, the host of the game has to actually be in the game already for others to join. So he loads up the game. And loads some more. Finally he's in the game killing zombies without me, and as I try to join the game, he dies and the connection is lost, thereby meaning that the map must be reloaded. He loads, I join his game, and now it's my turn to load the map. By the time I've loaded into the game, he's killed three waves of zombies.
As I've said before, Invasion mode is where players simply wander a map killing the waves of zombies that attack. There's very limited ammunition on the map, enough that with more than four players there wouldn't be enough guns for everybody, which is bad because some zombies puke on your character, nearly killing you. Every swing a zombie takes knocks you down, and if there are more than one zombie around you, they'll gang up on you while you're knocked down and kill you almost instantly. When you're dead the camera shows the zombies ganging up on your dead body, eating you, which is actually a benefit for the other players as it gets some of the zombies attention really well. This is great because when there's several human players on a map and ten to fifteen zombies and a map the size of a two-door garage, there's not much mobility. I'm not even joking. The five minutes of loading gives you few weapons, less ammunition, endless zombies, and barely enough room to move without bumping into something. And did I mention an incredible amount of lag?
So to sum up those last few paragraphs, there's an asinine amount of loading everywhere and the maps are tiny. Moving on to other aspects of the game, the sound design is terrible at best. There's low-key horror music, there's lots of grunts and groans, the the guns sound like guns. The graphics run off of the Unreal engine and are craptacular. The character models are block and blurry and there is a wild amount of blood. The environments are henious, especially considering the amount of time it takes to load the game. Remember "the fog" from pretty much Nintendo 64 game you may have played a few years back? It makes a return on this particular Xbox title as well. Ah, I love reminiscing.
Gameplay, of course, consists of running through these small levels shooting the hundreds of zombies that you'll encounter. The game has very limited ammunition, stressing the importance of getting head-shots. Head-shots are more of a task than one would imagine, though. For some reason, some weapons will make heads explode in an instant while others don't seem to do anything regardless of how many times you shoot their eyeballs at close range. On one multiplayer round I was standing next to my teammate with a shotgun and when I shot into the crowd, my teammate fell dead. That's right, somehow my shotgun blast killed the person standing next to me. And somehow zombies can survive multiple shotgun blasts to the face. Melee is a joke, as hit detection is way off. Even aiming is a chore. Sometimes while swinging your target reticle from one zombie to the next the game will freak out and freeze up for just a second, but when that second is over you're usually facing the other direction and towards the ground or straight up to the sky or ceiling. Wonderful!
Just one more glitch to describe and I swear I'm done. When my roommate first loaded his brand new copy of the game and started playing he was having some trouble with the control sceme, and when he came in and watched me play he kept asking me how I was doing things. I told him that the right trigger is for shooting or basic melee while the B button is for alternate fire and powerful melee. Why didn't he already know this considering he played the game before I did? Why, it's because the buttons simply were not responding at all for him. After he restarted the Xbox the controls worked fine, but why they didn't respond at all the first time is what matters.
Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green really did have a lot of potential, but really didn't come through with anything. The game is packed with glitches right out of the packaging, and even without those would be a poor game. Muddy, basic graphics, below average sound design, and a control sceme that simply doesn't respond well really are the shot to this zombie game's head. Don't buy it, don't rent it, just moan and stumble on.