ZOMBI Review

A Rotten Return to Form:

A few years ago ‘ZombiU‘ made for a very compelling reason to pick up the Wii U at launch. Demanding players be more contemplative and cautious than most zombie titles gave ZombiU a distinct flavour. Now that the title has made the jump from Nintendo’s home console to the rest of the world at large, I’m pleased to report that flavour still produces thrilling gameplay today.

Storyline:

In ZOMBI you’re unceremoniously dropped into the middle of London, a city already heaving with the undead, with nothing to your name. With no weapons and no supplies you’re left with a meagre chance at survival until Prepper – a thoroughly British ex-army chap – calls across London’s myriad of cameras to guide you to a safehouse.

So starts Zombi, a game that tasks you first at rebuilding your safehouse, restoring the power to your humble abode and activating a couple of extra CCTV links throughout the city (so you can aid more hapless survivors) but quickly elevates into a search for something a bit more important. Whilst Zombi never truly delivers on its own story in a meaningful, original way, it’s absence isn’t really that important. Zombi simply wants to motivate you enough to move through heavily infested streets to the next GPS objective on your radar, and thanks to some wicked gameplay hooks and an interesting approach to combat, it succeeds.

Gameplay:

Whilst in most games zombies don’t pose too much of a threat – aside from when they’re part of hoard a thousand strong and charging straight for you – Zombi fully realizes the danger of the undead beast. One zombie can prove a handful, a pack of three or more is suicide to approach. As a regular Londoner with no special skills or huge guns to his/her name, Zombies are tough to dispatch and quick to sink their teeth into your gooey guts.

You can smush a zombie with the blunt end of a cricket bat, or you can shoot them (and risk alerting more) with the sparse firearms you find around London. More often than not, I found the best approach was to avoid conflict altogether, and Zombi gives you the tools to do just that. Enter the Prepper Pad – a GPS system that doubles as a zombie radar and item scanner. It’s a nifty little device that was originally relegated to the Wii U’s touchscreen tablet controller, but here it is simply stuck to the corner of your screen. It’s a little unwieldy –and definitely the biggest downside to playing on other consoles – but it’s a workable alternative at most times.

Zombi’s big draw was always this tension the disconnect between tablet and screen fostered, and that unease is still present in this port. When you search through your backpack or lootable containers the inventory fills up most of the screen, leaving your character extremely vulnerable. The game doesn’t shy away from throwing stuff at you whilst your back is turned, either, and more often than not a hasty delve into my backpack resulted in a hasty death.

In Zombi, death is respected. There aren’t any easy ‘restart from last checkpoint’ options, instead this new found lack of life is treated with the permanence it deserves. You’re given a new player character who isn’t going to be as levelled or as experienced as your last avatar, and you lose all items that weren’t safely tucked away in the safe house. To claim back the best of your gear, you must head back out into the world, find your zombified past life and smash their brains in to reclaim your pack. It’s a system akin to Dark Souls that sees you playing a much more cautious game than you might otherwise. The last thing you want to do is go down with a backpack full of goodies.