In this bloodthirsty zombie epidemic you will face hordes of the living dead in a vividly re-imagined global apocalypse
Contains: Strong Bloody Violence, Horror and Gore
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Dead Nation is top-down shoot 'em up, horror adventure that takes place in a world afflicted by a zombie apocalypse.
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STORY - 3/5
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The plot behind Dead Nation is very standard in accordance with the zombie apocalypse dilemma that has, unsurprisingly, wiped out virtually all of humanity and subsequently transformed them into flesh-eating, ravenous monsters. The globe is overrun and seemingly defeated with no way to renovate it, and your character is apparently immune to the infection. But he won't watch the world die and further detach itself from it's initial beauty, and so motivates himself into making contact with a scientist and then to find a cure to the flesh eating virus sweeping across the globe. But is there a cure to such a nightmarish horror? It's as predictable as you can get when zombies enter the storyline, but you'll still be interested to see where the story takes you and the outcome of your efforts as you strive to get to important landmarks to establish progress. Cutscenes consist of a series of artwork images that depict the apocalypse while the protagonist narrates his mission objectives concisely, and the stylish yet simple approach to storytelling works fine throughout.
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CHARACTERS - 2/5
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Ever since George A Romero introduced the flesh eating undead hordes back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, zombies have carved a bloodthirsty gap into the movie and gaming industry, from the comfort of your chair, to the perspective behind the controller, giving you many chances to relish being involved in an improbable zombie epidemic. Apart from the optimistic protagonist who narrates his mission direction during mid-level intervals and doesn't give you must reason to condole for his efforts, zombies are the main stars of this game and you are the one who gets to splatter them all over the city in gruesome style!
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GAMEPLAY - 4/5
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"Fear and satisfaction overcame me as I mowed them down. I guess you could call it… justice". Playing as either the male or female character that is an option before the game commences, you'll be traversing through the various streets and locations of a world now inhabited by the mindless undead, getting leads to the new plot development, whilst all the time blasting away thousands of zombies. Dead Nation well balances the introduction of enemy types, shops and new weapons, and so the difficulty curve is generally fair for the most part, where early stages of the game see you up against more sluggish zombies in small quantities, and then building up to large waves of fast and unpredictable zombies that can cause panic in the latter scenes. In order to reach your common goal of a new location and further directions to try and do something about the zombie threat, you'll be using a wide variety of weapons and items to both divert enemies attention, and demolish enemies intentions. The Rifle is your first and (to be honest) one of your best weapons to keep from being redundant in your powerful, upgradeable arsenal, and its unlimited ammo supply means it's a great weapon to resort back to if your other weapons ammo is growing dry when ammo is scarce to find. New weapons and items gradually unlock as you progress through the game's 10 levels, usually becoming available at the beginning of a level. Weapons range from the conventional (SMG and shotgun) to the downright crazy (Shocker and Blade guns) but are all fun to wield against the zombie plague. Items consist of explosives and Molotov's with the exception of flares that distract the attention and do no harm. The level design is constantly changing, and there are always things to scavenge off the main path if you care to take consideration when a small gap is revealed, and the rewards are balanced and worthwhile, ranging from common amounts of money, moderate amounts of ammunition or rare armour pieces. Money can be found in the trunks of cars, can be obtained from killing zombies or from crates, and is used for purchasing new weapons and items, and also upgrading your arsenal. With weapon shops reasonably spaced, you can benefit from the lucrative zombie slaughtering by upgrading what you want, with many different options for each weapon and item that vary from increased power to ammunition capacity, and also to pick your armour attire which all vary differently in proving advantageous from strength, endurance and agility.
Massacring zombies is satisfying and bloodthirsty, and hit detection and physics are equally impressive. All manner of gory destruction, corpses and miscellaneous random objects remain on the ground and never disappear, and while it's nothing extremely noteworthy about the game, it's an aspect that is considerably under looked in most games where blood and bodies disappear upon death. Explosions show a proximity ring for the area of effect, and the explosion unsettles everything within the blast radius, showing off the realistic physics that I aforementioned were very impressive and eye-catching. The many bloodbaths you create leave behind some items but not very often, usually only a small health pack and ammo. Health is fully replenished at occasional checkpoints, but there are too few health packs provided for the spacing of the checkpoints, and so after all your hard work, one large group of ravenous zombies can cause you to respawn at a long distance that is really soul destroying when you've got so far and only required a decent health pack to assist you; especially since the health packs do so little to actually replenish your health but only marginally gain some life back.
But overall the gameplay in Dead Nation is extremely fun and often intense, where you not only need to fend off the large wave of zombies, but cleverly use environmental distraction such as forcing a car alarm to go off, shooting a vending machine, and any other things that involve loud noises or flashing lights to attract the zombies attention and focus on that rather than the smell of your flesh. Grenades and mines attract zombies aswell because of the bright flashes, and the aftermath of an action scenario always litters the street with blood and guts which are all enjoyable to engage in.
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GRAPHICS - 4/5
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Dead Nation is visually impressive for a top-down shooter, and all the environments are rich with detail that enhance that apocalyptic realisation of survival amongst the zombie threat. You traverse through environments that are all believable locations from New York City, such as central park and high importance highways, and the artistic touches gone into creating them in a linear style is well done and produced with considerable effort. The game engine can support large numbers of zombies on screen at a time, and the game never lets the framerate drop once, and so a large amount of credit deservedly goes to that since it's by far the most important technical aspect that the game simply must have achieved during development.
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SOUND - 5/5
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Audio-visual presentation is great, with the combination of effectively creepy audio and the abandoned streets with distant sounds echoing your solitude. The zombie groans and footsteps of larger adversaries reverberate around the environment, displacing your feeling of power with such excellent sound effects for weapons, by forcing upon you a feeling of isolation and claustrophobia as you frequently become overwhelmed by the monstrous undead and only narrowly escape the clutches of hungry foes each time with skill and luck on your side. The blood splattering effects as bullets explode zombie heads or dismember them, are all sounds that are grotesquely vivid and convincing, and overall the sound department of this horror adventure is solid.
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CONTROLS - 3/5
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The control configurations in Dead Nation are organised nicely, with no use of square, triangle, circle or X required at all, but a main focus heavily relying on move and aim with both analog sticks in a dual formation that works easily. You shoot with R1 and throw items with L1 while constantly changing your equipped item and weapon by using the directional buttons. Unfortunately a frustrating flaw is evident with changing weapons and items, and that is the fact you are under pressure during an onslaught to change weapon and item load-out ridiculously fast, forcing you to sometimes not have the correct weapon equipped as you'd have liked but panic has overridden your concentration as the zombies rapidly close in on you, and it will maybe prove a costly mistake. A radial menu that freezes time and appears on the screen would be much more suited to this game, since before long you'll have so many weapons that equipping the correct one forces you to glance down at the left bottom corner of the screen as you quickly swap through them. It just proves awkward most of the time, making things intense and keeping you immersed, but not quite giving you the right breathing space to choose the right weapon for the right enemy. Other than that, there are no problems with the controls or the responsiveness of each action.
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ATMOSPHERE - 4/5
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An immersive and well established apocalyptic atmosphere engulfs the gameplay, and the richly detailed environments contribute to the tentative feeling you'll get when exploring through the locations you find yourself battling for survival in. The atmosphere is dark and oppressive, filled with grimy artistic touches and stomach clenching gory imagery. The tension immediately arises whenever you become under threatening attack by a dangerous amount of zombies and the audio quickly amps up simultaneously to arise the already high intensity of bloodthirsty violence unfolding on screen. Some areas of the map are enveloped in a fog, and only the beam on your flashlight can cut through the darkness and reveal the horrors obscured from view, and this forces you to cautiously move forward, never sure of what dangers lurking may become restless and brutally attack suddenly. Because it's played from the top-down perspective, and slightly slanted, you are granted some indication of what lies ahead which is good, but after the first few levels you begin to see through imminent zombie entrances that occur from the back of a lorry or from shop windows and so you can usually get the drop on them rather than the other way around. But there's no question that the atmosphere generated is the correct one to fulfil the survival horror feel you constantly sense present.
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ENEMY AI - 4/5
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Whether you are faced with a bunch of George A Romero's classic, sluggish zombies, facing a blob-like zombie that explodes when close to you or a mixture of the two, each variety of zombie proves dangerous in some way. They have intelligence of the most basic creature possible, and so dealing with a single zombie is easy, but when in large groups they pose a serious threat on your survival. They obey only their natural instinctive desire to feast on the flesh of the living, and so if you get too close to some of the single zombies straying on their own and lurking in the shadows there will be no way to conciliate them, only distract them shortly. They quickly become distracted by flashing lights or loud sounds, and so using car alarms and vending machines is great way to save yourself in even the tightest of circumstances. For brain-dead animated corpses, their intelligence is exactly what you'd expect if you've played various games or seen movies including them, and so there isn't anything disappointing about being up against the hordes of the living dead here, and they remarkably prove quite a challenge for most of the game, where within seconds you'll quickly find out that a grave is difficult to dig yourself out of.
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LENGTH - 3/5
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The 10 progressively challenging levels that take you around the city with only a basic objective at the start of each chapter will take you a reasonable length of about 7 or 8 hours depending on the difficulty. For the price tag you'll be considerably pleased with what you get within that space of time, and the zombie genocide you cause will be certainly gratifying and worthwhile.
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REPLAY VALUE - 3/5
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Dead Nation doesn't provide much that could possibly entice you back for a second outing in slaughtering zombies, but the 5 difficulty levels certainly ensure you that if you want to try and be the best on the world leaderboard, then you'll have to replay the campaign on various hard modes that definitely will test your skills, reactions and also your patience. Aswell as playing solo you can team up with a friend in co-op mode, where more zombies will be integrated to test both of your abilities to adapt under pressure if you want to succeed and overcome the odds. In conclusion, the top-down perspective works nicely, and the effort gone into producing this game clearly shows in both level design and visual style. Taking on the living dead with a handful of powerful weapons and items despite a clumsy control scheme to switch your loadout is extremely fun and intense, and you can quickly find yourself addicted to massacring wave after wave of relentless zombies as you hunt for a cure to the monstrous virus that truly has turned the world into a dead nation.
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OVERALL SUMMARY - 8.5/10
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Good Points: Impressive level design and graphics, Well generated zombie apocalyptic atmosphere, Excellent and realistic physics, Effectively creepy audio, Extremely engrossing gameplay with plenty of enemy variety, Robust arsenal of weapons and items, Well balanced unlockables and upgrade system, Zombies get dismembered and blow up in all sorts of gory ways.
Bad Points: Switching weapons and items can get awkward during a zombie onslaught, Too few health packs for the spacing of checkpoints can get frustrating.