188. Zombi (Ubisoft, Playstation 4 (WiiU), 2015)

From the studio that brought us game #161, Peter Jackson's King Kong, Zombi was originally a WiiU launch title that was eventually ported over to other same-generation systems with some gamepad-specific features removed. Apparently conceived as a Rayman Raving Rabbids spinoff, Zombi does not display any of its cartoony origins, instead coming across as a pretty trite entry in the already dead-horse-beaten zombie survival genre. It's just kind of there, nothing is particularly exciting or too tedious.

Gameplay / narrative take the form of you as a survivor scrounging around the London underground looking for supplies. You are lead by "the prepper", a very British man who apparently knew the zombie apocalypse as coming and created a base of operations. You play as a randomized person complete with random name and job. Each time you die, you respawn as a different randomly generated character with a name and a job, and your old corpse is out there in the world so you can go get the supplies you lost. I guess this is all Demon's / Dark Souls-y, but I actually never died in my few hours with the game, so that particular feature was lost on me.

Most of the game is spent exploring and scanning. You can scan any container, zombie, animal, door, and many other items around to put them on your minimap and show if they contain anything lootable. It all feels pretty Metroid Prime, though mildly less intrusive. There is also a lot of pinging your radar and seeing whats on your map, especially before you scan a map node to give you minimap access.

I got a little more excited when the game told me I was going to Buckingham Palace, but it turned out to just be a bunker, not the grand palace that I wanted to pull me away from the sewers and subways I had grown tired of. Zombi is pretty British, so it at least has that going for it in terms of personality, but otherwise there's not much.

Controls are mostly serviceable and occasionally annoying. You have to hold L3 to run, which is just not comfortable. You also cannot use the dpad in the menus, which is especially chafing because the menus are real time, so if you are rooting around in your backpack, zombies could still be attacking you, and a dpad is faster an more accurate than a stick in a menu. This is a frustration I have not yet been able to articulate on this blog mostly due to playing older games. There is a quick turn around button, though, which I always appreciate.

3/5, the game that dares to ask: "what if Zombies were British?"