Reviews// ZombiU Review Part II

At the back end of last week we were checking in on the first two hours of ZombiU . Now, with plenty more hours in hand, let's pick up where we left off. So, where were we?

Ah yes, tricky situations. As you gain a bit of experience and get a proper feel for the game, you earn a feeling of, ‘Fuck you, zombies!’ as your bash their heads in with your cricket bat (which, might I add, has a very satisfying feel about it); not that this feeling lasts very long.

Before you settle in with your new gaming mindset, the hordes get bigger and harder. You’ll face more equipped zombies. Some with full bulletproof armour and S.W.A.T.-type helmets, and some with bombs strapped to their chests that’ll blow up the first time you hit them.

The annoying part about the suicide bombing undead is that if you find yourself bullet-less, you’re going to struggle to take them down without seriously damaging or even killing your character. Mixing these newly equipped zombies with a horde of the usual shop-owner types makes for a tough time. And yes, you are going to die – more than once, probably.

What’s interesting about dying is that you respawn as a completely new character – a nice addition if you ask me. It adds a slight aspect of realism to the post-apocalyptic, zombie overrun streets of London. Now, as you play through as one character, you collect loot; sometimes from dead zombies, and sometimes from lockers or suitcases.

If you revisit the area in which you died, you’ll find the corpse of your previous character reanimated and hungry for flesh. There’s a special prize if you kill any previous characters, any ideas? Yep, you can claim back any loot that they may have collected. Annoyingly though, only the most recent dead character is available to kill, so if you die en route to collecting all that gear from ‘John Smith’, you’re pretty stuffed.

Anyway, I’ve mentioned loot, I suppose I should explain what type of loot you can acquire; most commonly, you’ll find ammo, med packs and small snacks/drinks (which restore a small portion of health). Sometimes though, you’ll find new guns. And when you’ve found new guns, you’ll find new upgrades for these guns.

Perhaps one of the corpses has already claimed it, or maybe someone’s left it lying around next to a work bench - convenient, considering that a work bench is required to upgrade weapons. These upgrades come in one of four parts: Firepower, Firing Speed, Spread and Capacity. You can’t use all of these on any weapon though, I (stupidly) tried to add a capacity upgrade to my double barrelled shotgun before realising; hold on, it’s double barrelled - it can only hold two shots at once.

I’ve mentioned London a couple of times so far haven’t I? Well yeah, the game is set in London. Throughout your travels you’ll visit well know locations such as Brick Lane and Buckingham Palace, but not exactly as you remember them. Some areas in the game have a very eerie feel about them.

A lot of the time, you’ll find yourself stood in the middle of a foggy street where you can’t see much further than a couple of metres in front of your character. I’ve genuinely found myself hesitating while playing – do I go around this next corner? Or should I just give up now and go make myself a brew?

Now I’ve already said that the Wii U GamePad is used for arranging your inventory, viewing your map and mowing down zombies while sat on a machine gun turret. But that’s not all! The first thing I’ll say about the multiplayer on ZombiU, is that it’s offline, and I know, you’re all sighing and saying ‘uhh, we’re going to have to use splitscreen if we want to check out multiplayer’ – no! No you are not. We have two multiplayer modes to choose from: Assault, and Killing Box.

Assault is a capture the flag-type mode. Player 1 takes hold of the Wii U Pro Controller (or Wii remote and nunchuck) and is thrown into a map on the TV screen. There are flags dotted around the map in which player 1 has to capture. It’s not all that easy though. Player 2 takes a birds-eye view of the map on the GamePad screen.

Commanding an army of different types of zombies, it’s his job to thwart player 1’s plans and destroy the flags by spotting his reanimated lumps of flesh around the map to do what they do best – make a mess of everything.

Killing Box is a survival-type mode. Again, Player 1 takes the TV screen and has to, well, survive. Player 2 takes the GamePad. This time though, there are no flags to worry about. Player 2 simply has to place zombies wherever he/she wants and send them to mutilate Player 1.

I think that overall, the multiplayer is a great idea and it’s been executed well. Nobody wants to play splitscreen, really. Now you might say ‘Well if people don’t want to play splitscreen, why not just have an online option?’ Well, it wouldn’t work is why. ZombiU simply doesn’t need online. It’s a survival horror game at the end of the day.

And that’s just it. ZombiU is a survival horror game, and it certainly does a brilliant job when it comes to pad-clenching scenes. Unfortunately, the combat is very repetitive and you aren’t offered many different ways to purge the undead, but the sheer horror of the game makes it worthwhile. The GamePad is integrated usefully - it feels right, and not as though it’s just being used because it’s a new piece of hardware.

Pros
+ Genuinely scary
+ GamePad is integrated well
+ Multiplayer is a lot of fun

Cons
- Repetitive combat
- Annoying grunt when you swing the cricket bat
- Graphics aren’t quite up to scratch

SPOnG Score: 8/10