[WiiU] ZombiU

[Handleit_44]

ZombiU hands-on: the Dark Souls of zombie games

One of the magic ingredients that makes a good survival horror game even better is making the player feel dangerously under-resourced, pathetically weak, and continually on the backfoot at all times. If this stresses you out, then ZombiU is not the game for you.

It has been absolutely engineered with hardcore gamers in mind, mixing the continuous dread of games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent with unforgiving trial and error format of Dark Souls. You will die a lot, but with each death you will learn what not to do next time.

There’s also a flashlight that runs down mercilessly fast, and it takes ages to recharge. Once it’s off, the sewers are seriously pitch black, which is why the Wii U GamePad’s radar screen is helpful for spotting movement in the dark.

Opening your backpack is activated by simply swiping down on the touch screen, but it renders you immobilised.

You can then drag your favourite items to the hot bar and organise loot gathered from corpses. You only have so many slots, so resource management is yet another problem facing your survivor.

This is where both the respawn and safehouse mechanics come into play. Safehouses do exactly what they suggest – they are respawn zones that play home to crafting benches and lockers that can be used to stash precious loot.

Lockers are crucial, because when you die and respawn as a different survivor, you lose everything – save for your cricket bat, flashlight and a pistol with just six rounds. Back at your point of death, your previous survivor reanimates as a zombie carrying all of your gear.

When wading through water, your survivor lifts their backpack overhead to keep it dry, leaving you utterly defenceless and unable to attack. Rushing through the ravaged streets of London is a recipe for disaster and should be avoided at all cost.

Every inch of the game smacks of Dark Souls, and this comparison is highlighted further by ZombiU’s messaging system, which lets you walk up to walls and leave graffiti tag messages for other players online.

These aren’t actual words, but symbols. So you could select the ‘stairs’ icon and a ‘thumbs down’ – to basically say ‘don’t go downstairs’. There are many symbol combinations geared towards highlighting hazards or killer loot, so it will be interesting to see how these are used – or abused – once servers go live.

Finally – and this is a stroke of genius on Ubisoft Montreal’s part – once one of your survivors dies and then reanimates as a zombie, there’s a chance they will also spawn into your friends’ game too.

So you can hop on Miiverse and say, ‘hey I died at this location holding a brilliant weapon. Go find me to claim it’, and vice-versa. It’s a neat way of sharing weapons and collaborating with other players to beat the game.

 

[Swarley]

This article really has me intrigued. I absolutely love zombie games, and of course Dark Souls is beyond amazing.

 

[Swarley]

 

[IamMedellin]

 

[Swarley]

This game looks pretty boobies.

 

[DoubleDeuce]

This looks sick! Too bad I'm not getting a WiiU

 

[IamMedellin]

 

[JimLeavy59]

Not sure why but that video killed any interest I had in this game.

They have a Wii U set up at a Target and too be honest the gamepad felt really nice in my hands but this console seems like it should have came out 6-7 years ago.