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Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green Hands-On

We go up against the walking dead as we check out Brainbox Games' upcoming shooter for the Xbox.

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Currently scheduled for release next month, Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green is a first-person shooter that serves as a prequel to the George A. Romero's Land of the Dead movie. The game casts you as a farmer attempting to reach Fiddler's Green--a fortified city that affords its inhabitants something resembling a normal life by protecting them from the ever-growing army of walking dead.

You'll start your zombie-filled adventure inside the large farmhouse that the game's central character calls home, and your first, seemingly harmless task will be to talk to a stranger who is milling around outside your front door. Predictably, the stranger in question is in fact a zombie, who will make a lunge for your brain as soon as you approach him. If you haven't already taken the time to explore your house, you'll be unarmed at this point; and although the punches you throw feel quite satisfying when they land, you'll definitely want to search the house for your rifle before the aforementioned zombie's friends start to arrive.

Medical supplies, for some reason, have to be used instantly or left behind.
Medical supplies, for some reason, have to be used instantly or left behind.

As you explore the farmhouse, you'll use an action button to search closets, desks, and cabinets for anything that might be useful; it's worth noting that medical supplies can't be picked up and stored for later use. The same action button can also be used to close doors behind you, which will often buy you valuable seconds as your pursuers--seemingly with no understanding of door handles--bash their way through them. Most of the zombies that we've encountered thus far are slow-moving, which makes circle-strafing around them quite easy for the most part. You can never be certain where the next wave of enemies is going to come from, though, and although single enemies rarely pose much of a threat, dealing with a group of six or seven can be quite challenging, especially since ammunition is in short supply.

One of the best ways to control the zombies that pursue you quite relentlessly, we've found, is to shoot their legs off and then, as they slowly crawl towards you, finish them off with whichever melee weapon you're carrying at the time. To date, we've clobbered Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green's walking dead with both a shovel and a hammer, each with a quick attack and a slower but more powerful attack. Other melee weapons in the game will include baseball bats and fire axes, though we'll be surprised if using either is quite as satisfying as whacking a zombie in the head with a shovel. The only other items that we've come across in Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green have been keys and bolt cutters used to open locked doors--and, at least in the early levels of the game, they've never been located very far away from the doors in question.

Let's hope this corn tastes better than it looks.
Let's hope this corn tastes better than it looks.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green will feature a number of locales based on those in George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, but so far we've explored only a number of different farm buildings and the cornfields between them. The cornfields, incidentally, make for some particularly challenging gameplay because it's rarely possible to see more than a few feet in front of you when you're walking through them. What's unfortunate, then, is that the corn right in front of your face--like pretty much everything else in Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green--looks downright ugly by today's standards, and if the game weren't scheduled for release so soon, we'd be convinced that the majority of the visuals were just placeholders.

In addition to the single-player storyline, Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green will boast both competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes on Xbox Live. We'll bring you more information on those, and on other areas of the game, closer to its release.

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