Zombi’s high-stakes and dark environments demand caution, but it also gave me the tool I needed to make that caution as painless as possible. The artists and sound designers nailed the atmosphere. The rough edges didn’t matter when I crept along at a snail’s pace with my eyes locked on the next dark hallway. It isn’t a particularly beautiful game world, but Zombi rightfully puts the emphasis on sound and lighting rather than a raw pixel count. Their quests sent me deep into zombie-infested districts of London, which are silent and eerie, and usually stayed that way unless I ran around like an idiot.

In exchange for shelter or new technology, most people wanted something from me. The cast grows much larger in the second half of the game, and I welcomed the mad ensemble for the flavor it brought to an otherwise familiar setting. Another man fortified Buckingham Palace and used its resources, including imprisoned test-subject zombies, to work on developing a cure. There’s the “Prepper,” a man who heeded 400-year-old prophetic zombie warnings and now, for reasons I don’t want to discuss, allows survivors (myself included) to live in his safe house. It’s a shame, because while Zombi’s main story events are predictable and silly, the characters I met along the way were each well-defined, motivated, and just insane enough to keep me from trusting them. Despite different names, ages, and genders, all my survivors were really the same thing: a vessel to carry the possessions I actually did care about. However, the game puts no effort into making me care about my characters in a human way.

Zombi, if you didn’t know, is a new version of that game, now made for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.It includes a few updates, but ditches the multiplayer mode which required the Wii U gamepad.īecause valuable goods (like bullets) are so rare, and because fighting zombies takes so long (more on this soon), Zombi’s unique death system adds welcome and constant tension to every encounter, no matter how small. This was also the main hook of ZombiU, the 2012 Wii U game.

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