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…
The ABC's of Gaming 