Dead Land is one of those games that plays and feels like one of those causal games on either the Android, iOS Tablet devices or as a game that you would play at lunch time on the Internet web browser. In any case it's a game by KODOBUR and released on the PlayStation 4 as a cheap downloadable game that sells for £2.99. What do you get for a game that sells at that price? An on-rails first person shooter that literally has no value or any gameplay depth and it's decaying undead zombie with its flesh that has rotted away from it's dead corpse.
The gameplay is a endless survival game and like I said before it's on-rails where the game controls your movement but you can still sidestep left and right and use the right analog stick to look around like a proper first person shooter and your goal is to avoid or use whatever weapon you have to fight against zombies that stand in your way. The game only lasts till you get killed and the points you get total from how many meters you ran and how many zombies you killed and the points you get can be used in the armoury to unlock other weapons.
You start the game with an axe but eventually when you get enough points you can put them towards starting with a weapon, have more ammo even though for some reason the game says armour when the picture shows extra bullets. I'm assuming it's a text error. You can also put points in for more crates which makes more of them to appear frequently. Every you start the game or restart the game after dying you are always going to a different part of the map as well as starting with a different weapon. Once you have enough points you can buy other weapons like a pistol, a shotgun, machine guns, a katana, minigun and a flame thrower.
You just basically keep playing to see how many meters you can run while killing a ton of enemies till you get enough to unlock the next weapon and then you play again and do the same with other weapons. Enemies range from regular zombies to zombie dogs and if you manage to get far you'll then get the fast mutant enemies that can jump at you making them tough to take down. The gameplay is about as boring, repetitive as it's simplicity. It attempts to add replay value by making you play the game multiple times just to unlock the other weapons and it gets very repetitive after dozens or so times of shooting endless zombies and then dying afterwards.
I'll best honest the only thing I like about this game is the graphics, it's an okay looking game for how cheap this game really is. The character models look decent and the blood splatter actually looks pretty cool plus the details on the environment including reflective effects are cool. The animations are solid aside from the shotgun animation which acts up for some reason when firing however the game only has one music track which only plays in the main menu and the frame rate is pretty bad when plenty of stuff happens on the screen. There is glitch I did find twice which when using the axe there is a chance that the game stays stuck in slow motion after killing enough enemies with the axe during this the game stays slow till that is you die and when the speed fixes itself the framerate dips down even worse making it almost unplayable forcing you to close the game down and start it up again it just to fix it.
It's not just the short and repetitive nature that really makes this game as dead as old bricks but the gameplay has plenty of other issues which does make the game also a pain to play. You die just by simply touching a single enemy and some enemies can also crouch which in some situations you could be doing so well then bump into a crouch enemy that you won't see coming and sometimes it could be camouflaged in the grass making not able to see him which causes you to die cheaply because of it and it gets annoying very fast. You also have only a small bit of area to sidestep around in parts of the map that are open and large and its possible to get stuck between groups of zombies and not be able to sidestep out it making avoiding them impossible unless you can shoot your way out of it instead.
Each time you get to a crate it will give you a new weapon at random as well as what ammo is in it and every time you get to another crate it will switch your weapon for another, which means you might get a weapon you want or something else entirely. Want to use a minigun and mole down waves of zombies with that thing, too bad you might end up with just an axe which makes the gameplay very random and annoying.
This game has some serious hit detection problems as well, shooting zombies is fair enough but however sometimes when using the Axe or Katana it will hit them the majority of the time but sometimes it doesn't even when you timed the press of a fire button perfectly it goes through the target completely which again causes a cheap and unfair death. Looking around with the right analog stick is also worthless cause of the autocentering you get when you let go of the stick which can cause you to lose sight of what's ahead of you so it's easier to aim by sidestepping left or right instead. The game will also turn you around in a different spot on the map when you least expect it and your character could turn around and run straight into a zombie standing right in front of you also which is also just annoying.
There are trophies in the game although only 12 which involve killing a certain amount of enemies with different weapon types and then trying get 1000m or the hardest of all 5000m which is just insane. Most of the gameplay problems are annoying to put up with but it's not until you leave the crates be for a couple of tries till you realize something. You could go further by not picking up the crates and only using the axe to fight the zombies as long as you don't kill too many enemies at all and only go for the ones in your way. Now I'm not trying to make this review look like an instruction manual or a guide but I'm serious when I say this but if you want to get more meters it's best to leave the other weapons and only use the axe on the enemies that are in your way when evading the large groups of zombies that you easily get the 5000m trophy and eventually complete the trophies list for the game in about a single afternoon if you can survive for that long that is.
Dead Land has literally got nothing in terms of value and gameplay and it is just a decaying corpse best left alone. The game costs £2.99 but however there are far better games that costs that much money then this. It is random with the weapons you start with and on where you start, has terrible hit detection with the axe and katana, it's cheap with the deaths and it quickly gets repetitive and boring very fast. If you want an enjoyable zombie survival game that's fun to play how about the zombie modes in Call of Duty or the left 4 Dead games which offer up more fun then this undead mess of a game.
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Game Score: 2.1/10
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Game Title: Dead Land
Platform: PlayStation 4
Developer: KODOBUR
Genre: First Person Shooter
Age Rating: PEGI: 18+
Release Date: 23rd May 2018 (Europe)
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The Good Points:
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1. It looks okay
The Bad Points:
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1. Terrible hit detection
2. Gets boring and very repetitive
3. Cheap and unfair deaths
4. Poor performance
5. No other replay value
6. Looking controls is pointless
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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