As far as I'm concerned all good horror games use one simple design choice to create their tension and thrills: player weakness.
Some games, like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, make this weakness your lack of weapons and your ever decreasing sanity. Resident Evil used to focus on fixed camera angles to strip the player of foresight and coupled it with dwindling, limited, supplies. Even Resident Evil 4, an action game through and through, features some good horror moments, most notably the Regenerators. After hours of demolishing weak enemies with a hail of fiery shotgun flavoured death you suddenly come up against something that not only looks and sounds terrifying, but that requires a more delicate strategy than "shoot it until it dies".
This has died off a lot in recent "horror" games. Rarely do you feel like your character is in any real danger, or even that they're in a situation they can't handle. Even though there's much fun to be had blasting guys heads off in F3AR (that name never gets old) it's hard to feel scared when you're playing as a character who can slow down time and has more explosives attached about his person than most small countries have in their entire arsenal.
Which brings us nicely to ZombiU, a game that understands the necessity for player weakness and, though flawed in its execution, manages to create a truly tense experience. See in ZombiU, when your player dies, they're dead. End of story. Their corpse joins the rest of the shambling undead, carrying all your precious supplies on its back. It's then up to a new character to return to their location, kill them and reacquire your stuff before continuing on with the games story.
What this allows for is a game that genuinely rewards players for being cautious and planning every move ahead of time. If you rush and panic, you'll die. If you do something stupid, you'll die. If you get too confident, you'll die. The majority of my deaths fell under the "doing something stupid" banner, here's a hint: stepping on your own landmines does not end well.
The only real problem with this structure is it can sometimes make for an annoying backtrack to find your player, especially towards the end of the game. Luckily I only died 6 times and they were spread out fairly evenly, but for those who don't play quite so cautiously this could certainly become an annoyance.
So that's all well and good, but how do we get to dispatch the undead? With a cricket bat of course! If you've heard anything about this game then you'll likely already know about this wonderful wooden weapon. It's your only permanent means of self defense, if all else fails, if your gun's are all clicking, this is what you're stuck with. And what a weapon it is (he lied); on your average zombie it'll take between 4 and 10 incredibly slow thwacks before their head finally splits open like a juicy melon and it becomes a frustrating routine dispatching isolated zombies this way so you can preserve ammo for larger groups.
However, what it does do is make you think even more about your slim ammo supplies, it makes every shot count, because whilst those single zombies are easily handled with the bat, a group means serious trouble if you've just shot half of your ammo into a wall. Whilst ammo is relatively scarce you do end up with a nice selection of guns, pistols, shotguns, rifles and even a crossbow are added to your zombie slaying kit, with the scoped weapons viewed solely on the gamepad making them hard to recommend in a tight spot.
That brings us nicely onto the WiiU features. It seems as if any time a new console launches with some kind of gimmick games developers go nuts and just cram all those features into their game. ZombiU is no different and the execution is as hit and miss as ever. Using the touch screen for your inventory generally works well and 3 touch sections on either side of the controller allow for quick item selection which is incredibly useful. But most of the other stuff is lackluster, the aforementioned scope aiming, tapping the screen to break planks off doors and scanning your environment using the gamepad all feel clumsy.
The console itself doesn't bring much to the table either as the games visuals are unimpressive with the only standout being some great lighting that helps set the right atmosphere wherever you are. The sound however is surprisingly good, voice acting is merely passable, but the environmental noises and zombie groans are fantastic. Couple this with a fantastic soundtrack that flip flops between terrifying and uplifting with ease and you've got the perfect auditory experience for the end out the world.
All that's left to discuss is the story and things are kept understandably simple; you're a survivor of a zombie outbreak, a mysterious voice comes over the Undergrounds tannoy system guiding you to into a safe house. This man is introduced as The Prepper, someone obsessed with conspiracy theories who knew this outbreak was coming and set up the safe house for survivors. He monitors you using London's CCTV network as you go through the game, linking up with the last remnants of the city in order to find a cure for the virus.
This basically serves as a way to move you between environments, with certain key items or interactions affording you access to new, previously inaccessible areas. It's these environments when combined with the one life system that really makes the game so good. There's a section late in the game where you move along a thin walkway in a sewer, there's a steep fall into the water below and a horde of zombies groaning down there in case your pants weren't full enough yet. If you fall, not only will you die, you'll have a hell of a time getting your stuff back. It's the kind of moment that gives you sweaty palms and the game's fantastic at delivering this sort of thing.
Overall ZombiU is a great game. Its flawed melee system, simple story and bland visuals let it down slightly, but it more than makes up for its weaknesses by providing not only an incredibly tense experience but by being one of the only games in years that can truly call itself survival horror.