Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Guilty pleasure"

7
ZombiU Image
Completely unique. Take Atlus from Bioshock telling you what you need to do, Dead Island type zombie combat, Left 4 Dead type graphics, Dark Souls type difficulty, and an English setting. You get very little ammo and a flashlight. And your main weapon is a cricket bat. Huh? But it works....for the most part. First the graphics are passable. Nothing special but I suppose it has a look. Problem is it is the same look over and over again. Music is up to par as is the sound effects. Control is good except for the gun play but for a survivor game it is a work of freaking art. And yes. This game is actually scary. The story? Well.....You start off as a random person. When you die you die for good. Then you become another random person. However you can go and collect everything that your corpse left behind. It is a cool concept. Once you die that corpse supposed to become part of the game. The thing about the story is I really got over it kind of quick. Mainly because I spent half the time kind of worried about my surroundings. Is that a good thing? I think so. You have a guy called the Prepper who is trying to lead you the way. Pretty sure there is something up with that. My average playtime has only been about 20 minutes or so so maybe the story picks up later. The Wii Pad is an important tool as well and this game more than any other game at launch works great and is almost a necessity. It holds all of your weapons, sonar ability to see through walls when looking for zombies, hold your health, and stats. But looking at it can get you in trouble. Why? No pause button in the game. The game wants you to feel uneasy and it does a really great job. Another thing about it? It is violent. Still feels strange playing a Nintendo system with this kind of launch title. Another pretty cool feature is online play. You can leave people messages on the walls. But you cannot play co-op or together. You basically just bump into their zombie after they have passed. But being able to leave messages on the walls are a pretty unique feature I hope to see in future games. I think this game has got a bad rap. I think people are expecting a Left 4 Dead or a FPS. That is not what this game is. It is a survivor game.. Playing it gun ho is gonna get you killed. Not conserving ammo as big of a pain as it is to use guns will get you killed. But you have to take chances and keep moving. The game does what it was meant to do. Make the player uncomfortable and does something unique. Once you get passed the control and get used to dying the charm comes out. I do think the game could of used another 3-6 months to flesh out more ideas and maybe another month to fix some glitches and slowdown (I noticed slowdown more than I wanted) but at the same time I realize they had to make the launch date. Hopefully we get a patch. Props to Ubisoft for again having something different during a Nintendo launch. But unlike Red Steel which was completely awful. This could be the start of a trilogy. Good game that could of been great.