Zombi U is a genuinely fun survival game ruined by a horrendously designed final act.

When the time came to man up and finally buy the Wii U I didn’t exactly do it with trepidation. Mario Kart 8 earlier that year had assuaged my fears some and the promise of Bayonetta 2 by the end of the year and the new Smash Bros. soon after made me feel a lot better about the decision. But ignoring the big Mario Kart release and the bundled New Super Mario Bros., there were a few things already released for the Wii U that tickled my fancy. One being the Wonderful 101, which I will get to in good time, and Zombi U, dull sounding game whose very title was a bad pun in the vein of a Nintendo 64 release.

But I remember at the Wii U’s launch the only game I was truly interested in was Zombi U. It was a game designed from the ground up with the Wii U in mind, meant to take advantage of the U’s exclusive features. While a lot of these end up meaningless (even detrimental), the truth is that Zombi U is a solid enough game in it’s own right to completely overcome the worthless gimmicks attached to it.

Zombi U takes place in London just after a recent zombie outbreak. Don’t stop reading just yet, I know zombies were way past their cultural goodwill years before this game’s release, but bear with me here. You play as a random survivor, given nothing but a name and profession, who stumbles upon a safe house and starts taking orders from a man named Prepper, who just wants to help you survive. And from there the game just starts. It’s not quite S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in it’s initial difficulty curve, but it did feel a good to play a game that let’s you figure things out for yourself.

Armed with a cricket bat, you make your way out into a fairly linear but branching enough version of London that invites you to explore, with caution, the wastelands left behind. Sewer holes make for fast travel connecting points and once you get a lay for the land it isn’t too hard to keep track of. You won’t find other survivors wandering the streets, just zombies.

This highlights the greatest use of the game’s setting. When the character you start as dies, they are turned into a zombie. You then respawn as an entirely new person with the same mission but with just the basic starting items. All the gear you’ve collected is still on the now reanimated corpse of your previous character. To get it back, you’ll have to kill that character, who stays near the place you died last time. Much like the Souls series, this adds a high cost to death and makes you extra careful about every action you take. It puts you at just the right level of unease that gives the whole game an unsettling feeling.

But when I say this game is about survival, I mean more in the general sense than in the zombie apocalyptic sense. Supplies are mostly scarce (Apparently the people of London subsist solely off of road flares) and even the act of opening a menu or scavenging a corpse doesn’t pause the game. Much like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you have to wait until you find a safe place to pull out your backpack or to search a cupboard. This is actually one of the games less annoying gimmicks, as inventory is managed entirely through the Wii U’s gamepad, whereas the real time action never stops on your TV.

It sounds ingenious at first but most of the time it just becomes a minor distraction. The lockpicking minigame? Sure, throw it on the gamepad. Entering the number on a keypad? There have been worse ideas. Tapping the manhole cover of a sewer a few times to open it? Like that one. Tapping a board a few times to remove it from a door? How about I just press a button and it gets removed.

Despite being designed for the Wii U in particular, the developers never really found anything to do with the game pad that couldn’t have been accomplished without it, save for the inventory schtick. But most of these parts of the game are harmless. No, what really kills the game for me is just how badly the finale of the game plays out.

In fairness, the game does warn you: This is the final segment of Zombi U, you will not be able to go back from this point. So I go for it. In short, I have to go run to a specific place, then to another, collect a thing, run to another, run back to the safe house, and then try and escape through one more location. So I run to the first place, no problem. Make it to the second place where this time the number of zombies, which has increased dramatically, finally downs me. Okay, just got to make it back to that point.

I try to fast travel to the nearest location except all my shortcuts had been sealed up. Who the hell did that? Now I have to run my way back through everything I had just gone through, this time without my best suppliers, which are still on my corpse. It turns out I could reopen the shortcuts, but I didn’t even know they had been taken out in the first place.

Needless to say, I died and lost all of my most valuable supplies. I ended up beating the game with the leftovers I had in a stash and sheer gumption. I’ll admit, there is definitely player error at fault here, but what was supposed to be an intense fight for rescue turned into an absolute droll as I repeatedly walked through the same empty areas over and over again until I reached the locations I needed to, at which point the zombie count would be higher than ever before.

The ending definitely put a damper on my spirits for the game, but I had a lot of fun with it overall. I just have second thoughts about replaying it now. Though the game’s hardcore mode is tempting…

Week #3: I am really, really terrible at guitar.

I should probably stop trying to sound like a broken record and start just trying to better myself. Not much to add this week, as I mentioned before the quick progress through at least understanding, not mastering, the basics is over and now actual grind time begins. I shifted my focus slightly this week to be about working on improving on one song, in this case Boston’s “Peace of Mind.”, which will likely be the song that gets me through this game.

Did finally manage to pass the palm mutes lesson, but that is the only thing I progressed on in that front. It also felt really rough, another moment when having an actual teacher giving me advice would have been nice.

Weekly updates might not be the best thing to do, more for lack of things to talk about after a while. I’ll mostly just be doing weekly ones to keep to a schedule but they may not be all that enlightening all the time.

That new Strider is alright.

While it’s hard to deny the actual dollar value of a PS Plus account, especially if you have the full PS3/4/Vita complement, what ends up happening most of the time is another indie game being added to my backlog. Titles like Stick it to the Man, Mercenary Kings, and Stealth, Inc. are just more games to sacrifice at the altar of never really getting around to play them.

Then one month the recently released Strider came out for PS4 and I gave it a shot. It was fine.

Developed by Double Helix, responsible for a handful of bad-to-middling games and the new Killer Instinct, Strider definitely stands head and shoulders above the likes of Silent Hill: Homecoming and Front Mission Evolved. This is likely due to the fact that Strider feels like a game that properly recognizes what works and what doesn’t rather than soullessly aping it’s predecessors.

Which may be a bit unfair, as I’ve never player the older Strider games. I know very little about him, outside of he is a holdover from Capcom’s more arcadey-er era, which this game still has a feel for. Not exactly a a straight forward sequel, the new Strider plays like a Metroid or Castlevania title, with a fully explorable map and hidden upgrades and items galore. Strider’s sword can be equipped with different elements that open different doors, he can summon the ghosts of animals that transport him to new areas, and can slide, dash, and wall climb for days. Think a speedier version of Guacamelee!, which helps keep it’s arcade roots intact.

The game’s story does exist, but it lacks the charm or striking aesthetic of the previously mentioned games. It has no pervading atmosphere or unique bent that gives Metroid or Guacamelee! their sense of self. Strider is like the Saturday morning cartoon of these games: silly in and of itself but hard for anyone over the age of ten to take seriously. The only level I remember with detail is a cool robot factory, mostly because it had some conveyor belts, which I don’t remember other games of this type having.

Other than that, the games highlights are definitely it’s boss fights. While possibly a few too many (This is one of those games where early boss enemies turn into more generic ones later), the fights are varied and interesting, from fighting giant mechanical dragons to jetpack bounty hunters to a trio of martial arts wizards, the game spared no expense in the boss fights. I will admit, however, there was one boss I just never figured out how to fight properly, instead just trying to out damage him until I succeeded, but that one’s more one me than the game.

For $15, it’s hard not to recommend a game like Strider. It’s not a long game, my clock came in just under 7 hours and I stopped to smell most of the roses and it doesn’t track time through retries, but it’s a solidly built one. Double Helix should make there games more like this one in the future, lest we be blighted with another movie tie-in like Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters.