Previews// ZombiU

Ubisoft seemed to be knocking all kinds of balls out of the park during its E3 conference, with multiple new IPs announced and a good showing of its upcoming core titles.

Wii U first-person thriller, ZombiU, was arguably one of the most interesting games to be revealed for Nintendo’s new white box, but at this stage in development also appears to be as grisly as the undead monsters you face in it.

The concept seems fresh enough, for a zombie game: in a post-apocalyptic London, you play as one of a number of survivors, who must gather vital equipment necessary to properly defend the human race against the flesh-munching threat. As it happens, a secret society has been squirreling away such equipment over the last couple of years in preparation for the outbreak.

In this particular demo, players had to overcome a short overground segment in front of Buckingham Palace, and take out a series of undead enemies before moving indoors to a nursery area in order to retrieve vital medicine to combat the zombie virus. The Wii U GamePad tablet screen acts as a map to track your progress, complete with fog of war so that you can’t totally prepare for the scare round that next corner.

The touchpad is also used to organise inventory in your current survivor’s rucksack, and to quickly switch between items and weapons by using hotkeys. Hold down the Left Trigger on the GamePad, and your character will look at his or her tablet device. The Wii U touchscreen changes into a scanner, which you can then hold up and move around to take advantage of some cool augmented reality scanning.

Scanning everything - from corpses to chests - is important to discover ammunition and extra items. From what I played of ZombiU, the game is not forgiving in the slightest. Each character is equipped with one injection of virucide, which will keep zombies from biting you if they manage to grab you. And virucide, as you can imagine, is extremely scarce in the game world.

Get grabbed by a shuffling undead and you’ll get a chance to plunge a needle into its neck and completely destroy it. Run out of these last-resort rescue injections, and you’re pretty much dead. It only takes one bite before your character is turned to a fellow zombie - and instead of starting back at a checkpoint, you respawn as a brand new human survivor and must play through the entire level from the beginning.

The cool thing is, in a feature akin to Dark Souls, your equipment is lost at the point in which you died - but instead of laying in one point, they stay with the recently-turned survivor you last played. Kill them, and you get all your loot back. But, with short supply of items and only three weapons to choose from - a cricket bat, a low-ammo pistol and a slow-reloading crossbow - it won’t take long before you’re killed several times over. I can see it getting to be a tiny bit frustrating.

Because of this, ZombiU is an incredibly slow-paced game. You take your time slowly edging from corner to corner in order to assess every situation. This in itself is not a particularly bad thing, but you’ve probably noticed videos of players trudging along looking like they don’t know what they’re doing. Navigation, despite the touchscreen map, is a bit confusing and needs some work.

What is slightly worrying, though, are the sluggish controls on the Wii U GamePad itself. There’s a very distinctive lag in using the control sticks to move and look around, and even with inverted controls off (which is how every game should be played anyway, right?) it all feels a bit too floaty to feel like you’re in full control.

Adding to this are some strange placements of touchscreen buttons - scanning, for example, places a ‘Scan’ button to the right of the screen, which doesn’t feel comfortable at all when reaching from the right thumbstick to the pad. Perhaps the point is to let go of the Wii U GamePad entirely with your right hand and use a finger to press, but that’s a pretty unintuitive way of doing things.

The graphics aren’t exactly fantastic, although that can all change later down the line. The important thing is that the setting and atmosphere is pretty spot on for a zombie apocalypse, with many jump-out-of-your-seat moments that make you feel on edge.

To this end, ZombiU is looking promising. It has some good ideas, but it really needs to work on the controls and their execution to make it feel like a worthwhile gameplay experience.