INTRO:
Killing people, even if they are fictional, is not exactly a notion that is comfortable to many. However, zombies, which are monsters that do undeniably resemble people, have always been an effective, almost guilt-free loophole to this fetish that lies under the veneer of conscience that many individuals have.
It just so happens that there are games that offer a trip down this loophole, and Nation Red is yet one more of these. However, where Nation Red does not excel in terms of originality, it compensates by having tight gameplay that rewards persistence.
PREMISE:
There is not much of anything that constitutes a story in Nation Red. From the looks of the game, it would appear that a bunch of military operatives have been assigned to deal with a massive zombie outbreak in central southern North America, specifically the rocky desert that is the proverbial "middle of nowhere" of the USA.
Other than that, there is almost nothing else about the story that can be discerned from the gameplay.
TUTORIAL:
The tutorial should probably be the first game mode that the player goes to, as the game may seem deceptively simple.
The tutorial is quite thorough in explaining every significant gameplay element, and eventually it will turn into an easy free-play mode after the player has gone through all the lessons. The player's performance in the tutorial mode will not be recorded, however, so the tutorial cannot be exploited to get ahead in the meta-game for Nation Red (more on this later).
CAMERA:
The camera is perhaps the most important aspect of the game, it is the only way the player can see incoming threats and get rid of them before they get too close to the player character.
It is a top-down camera that follows the player character around, which is perhaps appropriate, because it allows the player to look all around him/her and the zombies certainly do come from all edges off the maps. The camera is also satisfactorily quick at following the player character.
However, its default zoom is rather inadequate, which is odd. The player will need to zoom out every time he/she starts a session, which can be an annoyance.
Fortunately, the maximum zoom is quite generous, allowing the player to see dozens of zombies on-screen. It does not fully cover the maximum reach of every weapon, but hitting and killing zombies that are off-screen is not a strict necessity.
PLAYER CHARACTER:
There are up to four player characters, but the differences between them are merely cosmetic and statistical. They do have preferences for specific weapons (which grant them extra damage when using them), but they do not start any session armed with these.
Any player character can use any weapon, but he/she always starts with the Glock pistol, which is probably not the ideal weapon to use when there are dozens of zombies coming down on the player character.
However, while awaiting the appearance of stronger weapons and better supplies, the player character has a few means to keep the zombies away, such as round-house kicks to push them away. Dive-rolls are also another way to get away from danger, at least before the level gets inundated with zombies such that there are no safe spots. Still, dive rolls are going to be useful anyway, as they negate the damage from hits that would have otherwise harmed the player character.
The player character has up to four statistics, though only two of these are visible to the player. The first and most important of these is health. The player character can stay fighting for as long as he/she has health, and injuries will impair neither his/her combat capabilities nor the player's vision in any way.
However, other than the health bar underneath the player character's model and the counter at the bottom of the screen, there is no other way to keep track of his/her health. This may not seem an issue if the player periodically glances at either visual indicator, but any glance that the player takes keeps his/her eyes away from the zombies, who become more and more numerically superior over time.
The other statistic is stamina, which has only one visual indicator: the bar under the health bar. Most of the time, the player will not need to keep track of these as with proper planning or experience, the player can kill zombies before they come too close for comfort or clear them away from pick-ups and power-ups.
However, when the zombie bosses come over, the player might want to consider using dive rolls to get away from them. This is when stamina management becomes important, and there happens to be no other way to regain stamina other than to have the player character not rolling about (though standing still makes this process faster).
The third and fourth statistics are armor (which reduces damage taken) and speed; both are equally important for the player character's survival when compared with each other. Certain player characters have more innate armor than the rest, such as the medic, while the recon operative has the greatest default speed. However, there are ways to gain additional speed and armor, as will be described later, so taking any one player character is just a matter of personal preference.
WEAPONS - OVERVIEW:
As mentioned earlier, any player character starts with the reliable but quite underpowered Glock and a melee weapon. Both default weapons will demonstrate the general weapon designs of the game.
Firstly, and to get this out of the way, melee weapons are next to impractical. Although all melee weapons can one-hit regular zombies that are caught in their wide arcs of attack, they are too slow to deal with hordes of zombies. Attacking with melee weapons also cause the player character to move slowly, which is not desirable.
Furthermore, there is not much incentive to use melee weapons. There are only a few melee weapons in the game, and they only differ in terms of damage, animation speeds and reach. They are also not suitable against most bosses, with the exception of the zombie bosses with ranged attacks.
The guns in the game are far more varied than the melee weapons. Conveniently, the player characters carry an unlimited supply of ammo for any gun that they come across. However, instead of making the game easy, this convenience happens to be a necessity, because the zombies certainly do not drop any ammunition.
WEAPON BALANCING:
Even though the player characters may have unlimited ammunition, the guns do have magazines that have to be replaced or chambers that have to be reloaded. The more powerful a gun is, the longer it takes to reload. In addition, more powerful guns slow down the player character more (unless he/she has the Improved Loadout perk – more on perks later).
To illustrate this point, a light machinegun may be splendid in gunning down droves of zombies and can fire for longer periods than the Glock, but reloading it is a long chore, made all the worse by the weight of the weapon.
Similarly, the other statistics of a weapon, such as its damage, spread and range are also tweaked around to make sure that no one weapon is better than any other. If there are any weapons that are favoured by most players, they would be the assault rifles, though these do not have the firepower necessary to deal with boss zombies quickly.
Some weapons happen to be more notable than the rest, if only because of how preposterously effective they are. One such example is the Steam Hammer, which is a surprisingly powerful short-range weapon with a generous spread; it can quickly eliminate bunches of zombies that are too close for comfort. (Incidentally, this weapon may have been introduced to celebrate the game's inclusion in the Steam Store.)
However, this balance among weapons is disrupted when the player character runs over power-ups that temporarily improve weapons, or pick perks that negate some drawbacks of the more powerful weapons. The effects of these power-ups will be described later in a more appropriate section.
EQUIPPING & LOCKING WEAPONS:
Weapons are obtained by picking them up after they have been released by slain zombies as loot drops. Picking up one will either replace the weapon that the player character is currently holding, or replacing the other weapon that the player is stowing away.
Which weapon is replaced depends on which weapon the player is currently using and whether he/she has locked it or the other for indefinite use. Speaking of locking, this is a feature to retain a favoured weapon for indefinite use. Convenient as it is though, the player must do the swapping and locking in real-time while the zombies advance, which is hardly easy.
Yet, the player must learn how to lock weapons; unwittingly swapping favoured weapons out for undesired ones can be a major setback. Moreover, the models for loose weapons are easily obscured by the mobs of zombies; it can be easy for the player to have the player character moving over them in the heat of combat and swapping weapons unintentionally.
GUNFIRE:
The shots from a player character's weapon will move along the direction that the player character is pointing at, but they will not land at where the player's targeting cursor is; instead, they continue to travel in that direction until they hit their maximum range.
This is not an issue for weapons that fire bullets or some other direct-fire rounds; in fact, this is desirable as the bullets can still hit something if they miss their intended target.
However, this is a problem for the two grenade launchers in the game. The grenades follow the same physics-scripting, which means that grenades that miss their targets simply fly on ahead uselessly until they hit something. The grenades would have been a lot more useful if they followed projectile trajectories, or at least detonate close to where the player's crosshairs are.
Not all weapons fire shots at exactly where the player character is aiming. Weapons such as the sniper rifle are deadly accurate, but others, such as weapons with automatic fire, can scatter their shots along a narrow arc. For most weapons, the effects of this random scattering are fortunately only apparent at longer ranges, where the player is not likely to shoot along much as the zombies will become so numerous that the player character will soon be killing zombies that are just several feet away.
POWER-UPS:
In addition to loose weapons, slain zombies also happen to drop power-ups; like the weapons, these power-ups will eventually disappear if the player does not pick them up in time.
As to be expected of power-ups, they make killing zombies easier when they are retrieved. There is the Rammer, which lures zombies over when they would otherwise be chasing the player character, and the Turbine, which creates a temporary safe zone. Then, there is the Barrel, which the player character does not need to run into and instead can be blown up by merely shooting at it.
These three power-ups have their own unique models, but the other power-ups are often represented with generic-looking black discs with text labels being the only effective way to differentiate between them. These power-ups tend to either affect the player character or his/her weapons.
Among these, the Rage and No Reload power-ups are most notable, because they upset the balanced designs of the weapons. Others have more subdued effects, such as Incendiary and Uranium-Tipped Bullets, which impart properties that do not necessarily make weapons overwhelmingly powerful.
These power-ups have other significances when they appear in either single-player or multiplayer sessions, as will be described later.
PERKS:
In all except one game mode in Nation Red, the player character gains experience points from killing zombies. There are a few other means to gain experience points, but slaying the zombies is the main way.
These experience points contribute to a meter that shows the progress towards achieving the next level for the player character. Achieving a level allows the player to select a perk to upgrade the player character's capabilities with; there does not appear to be any other benefit to gaining a level.
What perks that the player gets to choose from upon achieving a level strongly depends on the perk setting that the player has chosen. In the lists within the main menu, there are options to set how the player character gains perks.
There is the Strategic setting, which appears to have the player draw from almost-fixed selections of perks that have been composed just for the map in play. To elaborate, certain perks will be made available for selection first, with the ones picked replaced by other certain perks; the permutations appear to change from map to map.
In other words, the randomness of the kinds of perks that the player would get is greatly reduced with the Strategic setting. However, the player may not necessarily like the selections that would be made available, as they sometimes do not seem practical enough for the map that is currently in play. For example, some maps offer perks that can handle zombie hordes early on, when the zombies have yet to become distressingly numerous.
The Random setting removes the restrictions applied by Strategic mode, resulting in completely random permutations for any map. This is perhaps more luck-dependent than some players would like.
Finally, there is the Auto Perk setting, which is perhaps the most disappointing.
On paper, it gives the player the convenience of being able to pick perks that will appear in the lists of available perks when the player character gains a level. However, the game does not inform the player of the catch of using customized perk lists: he/she cannot select any perk that he/she has not already included in the customized list.
This would not have been an issue if the player can control the chronological appearance of the perks in the lists, but there does not appear to be any accommodation for this feature.
Moreover, for whatever reason, the Auto Perk setting also includes counter-productive perks for use in co-op multiplayer; these perks will not come up in normal play. As the player has no way of knowing which player has them in his/her Auto Perk list when he/she enters a multiplayer session, these perks can result in griefing.
As for the perks, they come with only brief descriptions, which may not help inexperienced players much. Eventually, a player that perseveres and experiments would find out what each one does and when it is best taken during a session.
Some of them are utilitarian, such as Armor, which increases the armor rating of the player characters, and Less Clumsy, which reduces the speed penalty from walking backwards. Some others are rather risky, such as Adrenaline Junkie, which grants its bonus only when the player character is badly wounded, and Lone Wolf, which practically disables certain other perks in return for less stamina use when rolling about.
Deciding which perks to take is an important decision, so it is fortunate that the player gets to set the game on pause in single-player. In multiplayer, only the session host can freeze the game while anyone else has to pick perks while the zombies are coming. However, in hindsight, this was perhaps the least bad way to implement the pause in multiplayer.
If there is any problem with the system of perks, it is that there can be only so many perks and that gaining perks is the only way to grant quasi-permanent improvements on the player character. Once the player has picked all 60 and over perks, there is no more reason to gain any more levels.
On the other hand, this also means that any session with unlimited zombies and no time limits will eventually end in a game-over for the players, because despite how experienced or skilled the players are, the waves of zombies will eventually grow to the point of being so overwhelming that having all (useful) perks is not enough.
As mentioned earlier, some of the perks can affect the balancing of the weapons. Rage Unlimited practically gives the Rage power-up the No Reload buff as well, making grenade launchers especially devastating. Another example is Improved Loadout, which negates the slowing-down effect of heavier weapons.
SINGLE-PLAYER:
There are several game modes that can be played on one's own lonesome. There is free-play mode, in which the zombies will continuously spawn and their spawn rates will continuously increase over time. The player is all but doomed, with the only hope being that he/she may obtain a stupendous high score.
Barricade is perhaps the most interesting game mode, as its maps are more than just the wide open and boring places that are seen in the maps for any other game modes. As their names suggest, Barricade maps place obstacles in the way of the zombies that they either have to go around or bust through.
In addition, a Barricade map may have a secondary objective that the player must not fail. For example, The Farm has a scarecrow that the player must protect from the zombies, for whatever reason. Another example is the Warehouse, which has checkpoints that the player must not allow zombies to pass through.
In these maps, the zombies will go after the secondary objective if the player character is not near enough for them to consider pursuing instead. Therefore, the player must juggle between risking the objective and having the player character stay in the game as long as possible before the eventual game-over.
Barricade maps also tend to have pre-existing sentry guns that persist indefinitely, unlike those that are called in using the Sentry power-up. There are more differences than just this: they have temperature gauges that will fill up over time as they fire, eventually causing them to overheat and preventing them from firing temporarily. They also have ammunition gauges, which have to be refilled by having a player character stand near them.
They can be a hassle to baby-sit, but the player must learn to utilize them for defensive purposes, as sentry guns do a tremendous number on bosses.
After a certain update since the launch of the game, these pre-existing sentry guns can also gain experience points from killing zombies on their own. Gaining a level permanently upgrades them from the minigun-bearing variant to the autocannon one, but there are no further upgrades.
Survival mode has the player character being spawned into only one map already armed with the player's choice of weapon. However, the player character cannot gain any experience levels and thus no perks whatsoever. Power-ups are also disabled. The zombies only drop weapons when they are slain and lots of them too.
Unfortunately, because Survival mode removes so many features that are found in other game modes, and has only one map, it is of very limited fun. Moreover, Survival mode uses a variant of the Warehouse map, which has overhead beams that can annoy players by obstructing the view of the action. Coincidentally, observing one's surroundings is much more important in this mode.
At best, Survival mode is only a chance to show off how much finesse a player has. To survive as long as possible, the player must learn how to move from weapon drop to weapon drop to continue firing and killing zombies without wasting time reloading magazines or chambers.
The so-called "Missions" are perhaps the most disappointingly underwhelming single-player mode; they also happen to highlight the ultimately repetitive gameplay of the game in a bad way. The missions are nothing more than one-off scenarios, such as those that start the player off with mobs of zombies being already uncomfortably close to the player character, and one that requires the player to keep a wounded (or tired) and useless NPC soldier alive.
However, the missions do have a nuance: each time they are successfully completed, the game increases the difficulty of the mission by a certain degree, as depicted by the addition of stars next to the name of the mission in the selection menu. Each star increases the number of zombies, often by a subtle amount. There are fifteen stars in total, with the last few ones making the mission quite hairy compared to when the player started it for the first time.
If there is a problem with this nuance, it is that the mission's difficulty cannot be reverted in-game; to do so, the player will need to muck around with game files.
Finally, there is Custom mode, which is mainly used to support the playing of maps that have been created by users. There are few custom maps for this game, however, mainly due to its obscurity and lack of any considerable technical support from the game-maker for custom-made maps.
MULTIPLAYER:
Multiplayer makes use of most of the modes seen in the single-player aspect of the game.
There are the Free Play, Barricade and Survival modes, which are perhaps made easier with multiple player characters, provided that friendly fire mode is turned off. Turning on friendly fire may increase the challenge, but requires a lot more coordination on the part of the players, which is perhaps too much to ask for considering that the game does not exactly have a core of dedicated players.
King of the Hill is the only competitive multiplayer mode; in this mode, friendly fire is always (appropriately) turned on. The players must stay on the location that has been marked as the "hill" as long as possible and be the last one standing on it. Meanwhile, zombies will spawn into the map and throw proverbial wrenches into the plans of any players that are planning to hog the "hill".
In multiplayer, certain power-ups and their associated perks are disabled, likely due to technical concerns. For example, the Bullet Time power-up is not present in multiplayer, and consequently its associated perk, Living the Moment, is not present either.
ENEMIES:
Most of the enemies that the player will face are regular zombies, which have many permutations of models but generally share the same animation sets and colour palettes. There are more interesting variations, such as zombies that crawl on the ground initially, but eventually these make use of the aforementioned animation sets anyway.
Next, there are the Big Boys, which are morbidly obese zombies that are quite slow but tough, yet otherwise are not much more different than other zombies. There is a more interesting variant of Big Boys that are equipped with suicide bomb vests, which they will detonate when player characters get close enough or when they are shot to death.
The more interesting zombies are the bosses, which have been conveniently upsized to make them stand out from the other zombies. Generally though, these can be categorized into two types: those that mainly resort to close combat and those that use ranged attacks.
The first category introduces itself with the Axe Zombie, which is a precursor to more specialized melee bosses. Its straight upgrade is the Butcher, followed by the (oddly-named) Cut-off Saw Zombie. All of them may look different, but are practically the same sort of boss in terms of behaviour, though the Cut-off Saw Zombie does seem more aggressive than the other two.
Then, there is the Brawler, a heavily armored zombie that is slow but very tough. Functionally, he is not that much different from the previously mentioned boss zombies, but his toughness and hard-hitting melee attacks makes him an area-denial zombie.
The zombies that use ranged attacks may seem too much, especially considering that they are different from the others, which need to get close to inflict harm. Among these, there are the Machinegun Zombie, which shoots volleys of bullets from a gun that seemingly never runs out of ammunition, the Minigun Zombie, which hauls its minigun and sprays bullets in a wide but slow arc, and the Grenade Zombie, which tosses grenades periodically at where the player character is (or rather was).
These are actually quite easy to deal with, as observant players would eventually notice. The Machinegun Zombie makes wide turns, making it very vulnerable to melee weapons, whereas the Minigun Zombie does not have any attack other than its minigun-sprays. The Grenade Zombie does have a melee attack, but its grenade-throwing animation is so long that the player can get many hits in. Incidentally, these bosses are the only enemies in the game that melee weapons are effective against.
SCORE:
There is a score system that is tied to both the experience-gaining system and the meta-game of leaderboards.
The player scores points for killing zombies; the points to be gained can only become exponentially higher as the player racks up a larger and larger tally. A multiplier that is next to the score counter on the top right of the screen shows the exponential progress of the gain. This multiplier does not seem to go down in any way, not even when the player character is injured.
It just so happens that the points that the player gains also contribute to the player character's experience meter, so the score counter is a good indicator of how many experience points that the player has accrued.
The player can also gain bonus points by killing many enemies in a short, with each subsequent kill granting more points, and thus experience, leading to faster level-gains.
On the other hand, the experience needed to gain the next level will increase, so the player will not be able to exploit this system for bonus points too much.
The never-descending multiplier also means that the player's score counter gets exponentially higher as his/her character survives longer. This in turn means that the fantastically high scores on the Steam leaderboards for Nation Red may actually be quite believable, though the player(s) would have to have survived for a long time in a single session.
GRAPHICS:
Firstly, it has to be said here that the game has a predilection for shades of brown and green, with beige and sand being particular favourites. There will not be much colour contrast among different objects and characters that are seen in the game.
Instead, for purposes of visual contrast, the game resorts to silhouette shapes and postures of characters. The player characters have silhouettes that are difficult to mistake for anything else and they have stances that are to be expected from characters that have military training. The zombies, on the other hand, have the slackened poses that are typical of zombies, which change into full sprints as they get more agitated.
These smart visual designs make identifying incoming threats and getting away from them a lot easier than the game's small colour palette would suggest.
The character models that are seen in the game actually have quite a lot of detail on them, but the gameplay and the function-oriented camera can make appreciating them quite difficult.
Fortunately, the pre-recorded video that plays in the main menu and which appears to make use of mostly in-game assets does give very close-up views of the zombies. Most of them are convincingly pallid and diseased, as to be expected of "modernized" zombies in present-day fiction. They do look like they were formerly residents of the southern parts of the USA, albeit not without stereotyping such as some of them looking hugely obese and wearing a mechanic's jumpsuit.
Still, the different visual designs for different zombies do help the player single out particularly threatening enemies to eliminate first before the rest. Other than that, almost all of the regular zombies share the same animations, be they for shuffling, running or attacking.
The animations for running can be a bit laughable, as their legs are sometimes splayed in odd orientations. However, this may be acceptable as they are after all zombies.
As to be expected of zombies, they can die horribly, being mangled into pieces by particularly powerful weapons. Most of these dying animations are scripted, though this also means that the player would not be seeing cheap ragdoll physics.
The bosses are the most visually distinct enemies in the game. In addition to having very different models, they happen to be giants that tower over the other zombies. As preposterous as this looks, it does make them easy to spot when they are among the hordes. Their health bars are also always displayed together with their names whenever they are on-screen, which helps the player keep track of his/her progress at defeating them.
Other than zombies, the player will be seeing a lot of particle effects and decals. The particle effects are of course associated with gunfire and copious sprays of blood. The former are hardly brilliant, but are visually distinct enough to be seen among the hordes of dying zombies. The latter are there to inform the player that the player has managed to injure the zombies, with bigger splashes denoting that the player has managed to slay them.
Explosions are not as brilliant as one would think. The game attempts to hide them with ample use of screen-blurring effects (which are also used for Bullet Time). However, fire and burning zombies are quite well-done.
Power-ups, which are represented as black discs with symbols on them, and loose weapons that have been dropped by zombies bob about and have particle effects to show that they are there, but the particle effects eventually go away after several seconds. Moreover, they can be easily obscured by the zombies, which can be a problem.
Picking the Power-Up Hook perk does reduce the frustration of this problem and it is more than likely the player will want this perk anyway. However, before the player gets to pick this perk (which occurs depending on the player's luck), he/she will have to put up with these graphical deficiencies.
Loose weapons and power-ups have their names appear when the player has the cursor approaching them, and not just when it is over them; there are also bars under their models that depict the time remaining before they disappear. This is a convenient graphical design, though it could have been rendered unnecessary if their models have been made more visually distinct.
SOUND EFFECTS:
As mentioned earlier, there are few sound effects for indicating that the player character has taken damage. Other than the attacks of the zombies sounding beefier than usual, there is almost nothing else to be heard; the player character does not appear to utter anything when injured.
Fortunately, there are additional sounds for when the attacks of bosses hit for maximum effect. These are appropriately distressing noises. However, the game will not play these sound effects if the attacks of bosses merely grazed their victims (such as when they barely managed to dive-roll away).
The other sound effects that the player will hear are those for gunfire. Each and every weapon has its own sets of sounds, authentic or not (mostly not), but this does make knowing which players are using which weapons easier in multiplayer. Otherwise, they do not serve much use in gameplay.
Squelchy noises for gunfire hitting their marks are more practical, and the player will be hearing a lot of these as he/she guns down swathes of zombies. Explosions are similarly practical too, but they do lack variety; the player will be hearing the usual gas canister explosion a lot.
VOICE-OVERS & MUSIC:
There is not any voice-over to be heard in the game. To be more precise, the player would not be hearing anyone talking. The player does get to hear the player character grunt and yell as they fight, but otherwise they will not be saying much of anything, despite being the only sapient characters in the game. As for the zombies, they are the usual moaners and groaners.
The music is perhaps the most tiresome element of the game's sound designs. At first, the very few soundtracks may sound quite exciting, being more than decently done blends of rock and metal. However, that they are so few means that they will eventually loop, becoming stale rather quickly.
However, some of the game's music is used for purposes of gameplay. For example, when the player character dies, a bass guitar revving can be heard. It can seem obnoxious, but considering that there is not any spectacular visual indicator that the player character has died, it is perhaps needed.
CONCLUSION:
Nation Red is not breaking any new ground; gunning down hordes of incoming zombies with a top-down view until death eventually comes has been done before many times already. Moreover, its use of various shades of brown hardly offers a visual treat and its sound designs are generic.
However, gameplay-wise, it is plenty functional. In particular, its perk system can make gameplay less of a straight-forward slog through masses of murderous creatures.