Three Great Zombie Games

Everyone loves zombies. What’s not to enjoy about blasting apart the slow, shambling reanimated corpses of the recently deceased? So this article is dedicated to the brave men and women who brought us the video games to enact this fantasy. Hey doesn’t that one with his guts hanging out look like your boss?

The Last Stand

You can play this game online for free here. I’ve mentioned the last stand before in a previous article, but it’s more than worth mentioning again. You plan an unnamed guy who’s been lucky enough to survive the zombie apocalypse by building a barricade and defending himself with a little glock. Each night, you take to the barricade and need to defend it against zombies.

Sounds like a point and click shooter, but it isn’t. By moving around the barricade, you can get better lines of fire, and also you need to aim for the zombie’s knees of head in order to put them down with any relative speed. You CAN just pour lead into them… but you may find that they are chowing down on you before you finish them off. Then there’s the weapon selection. You can only carry two weapons, and while ammo isn’t limited, you do need to reload. So you have to think carefully about what weapons to take. Do you take the sawn off shotgun? Two shots, then a lengthy reload, but very powerful, or the MP5? And then what do you use a secondary weapon? Everyone plays the last stand differently with a tactic that works for them.

Then during the daytime, you have 12 hours to divide up between three tasks: Searching for weapons, searching for survivors, and repairing your barricade. Searching for weapons allows you to collect new and better kit, ranging from magnum handguns to Barret Sniper rifles. Survivors help you defend your barricade at night, and help you repair it during the day. Yet again, people play differently here. Some people pour everything they have into weapons, others try to find survivors. Still others play a game of balance.

The last stand is probably one of the best zombie games out there today (for free anyway). Don’t forget to read the diary each day, some of the stuff in there is a hoot.

Rating: Seven out of ten severed heads. A great web browser game, but still just a web browser game.

Dead Rising

Read the full review here.

This one’s on the Xbox 360, and is an absolute Capcom classic. The premise is fairly simple. You play Frank West, a photojournalist who gets wind of something big going down in a small town of Willamette, America. Frank flies in as a passenger in a hired helicopter, and snaps photos before landing on the roof of the local mall with instructions that the pilot should pick him up in three days.

Naturally, things turn south and the mall becomes infested with zombies. Now you need to survive for three days. What you do is up to you. Some people will run around trying to take pictures of everything, some people will try to rescue as many survivors as they can, some prefer to try and follow the story missions, many people will just wonder aimlessly around the mall, finding new and exiting ways to dismember the undead. The game is quite open, though certain routes are blocked and can only be opened by completing “scoop” (Story line) missions.

The game has multiple endings depending on how you play and how well you do (In true Capcom style). I won’t spoil any of these for you; suffice to say it’s very hard to get the true ending first time around. Speaking of which, the game has a nice little leveling system where Frank gains XP from taking photos, defeating enemies and rescuing survivors. These can cause various effects, such as learning new combat skills (Such as throwing zombies or gutting them), the ability to carry more items (very useful), and extra health boxes. When you complete the game, your character is saved and you can play through from the start again with your now übered up Frank. I’d recommend most people do this at least once before trying to follow the story properly.

Everything in the mall is a weapon in the hands of Frank. Guns, chainsaws, lawnmowers, electric guitars, bins, soda cans, Frisbees, joints of meat, toy light sabres, katanas, bowling balls, parasols… the list is endless.

The game isn’t without its flaws. The combat system is designed for tackling the undead, and is slow and clunky when you have to fight the games various still breathing psychopaths, though you do get used to this eventually. The scoop stories happen very close to each other leaving you little time to explore, or landing you in trouble if you stumble across a survivor or psycho. The difficulty curve is also more of a cliff, probably to balance out when you restart the game with your high XP character. But these flaws aside, Dead Rising is something everyone should play for a while, and a game every 360 owner should have in their library. A must for zombie lovers.

Rating: eight out of ten hungry groans: A fantastic game with only a few sticking points. Unfortunately, they are quite sticky.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis

This is an oldie, the original play station. What? Resident evil three? Not four? Yes, you see while resident evil 4 was a great game, it did not hold true to the feel of resident evil series. RE3, was very much a survival horror game, you needed to choose your gear carefully, you couldn’t pick up everything unless you where a true pedant, and the Nemesis was actually pretty f***ing scary (Well it scared me anyway. I was about 15).

You play Jill Valentine, a former STARS (special tactics and rescue squad) member, now trapped in Racoon city. With zombies everywhere, food and ammo limited and a desire to not become one of the undead, you decide it’s time to try and get out. There’s only one problem, a new breed of T-virus, the G-Virus, has turned up. And it’s created something terrible- and it’s after STARS members.

For me, that’s what makes a great zombie game. The survival horror aspect of it. The Ganados where not scary, you could mow them down quite easily, and you knew that there would be more ammo near by (Or Mr. “Whaddaya buyin’?). No, the true enemy in zombie films and games is other people and supplies. Yes you can easily gun down zombie after zombie after zombie, but then oh dear: Click Click Click Click. No more lead for you. And what about food? And can you trust the people you’re with? These themes where heavily woven into the “atmosphere” of RE3, even if they where not actively explored. You felt like you where on the edge. You where worried if you had enough bullets. You where worried that you should ditch the secondary weapon for some healing herbs, but wanted to hold onto it incase Nemesis showed his face. You couldn’t make a right decision in RE3; you could only make the one that would screw you over the least. This makes it far darker than Dead Rising, and I rank it as up there with some of the best games ever made, not just in the zombie genre. It told a great story, its control system was solid, it was actually scary, it was atmospheric, it was long and you’d play it again and again.

If you’re a fan of the zombie genre, you owe it to yourself to go and play this game. Badger your local video game shop until they get a copy in on trade.

Rating: Nine out of ten hysterical survivors: It’s very dated now, but there is very little wrong with it. Just don’t try and fight Nemesis.

Love video games? Check out some of the great developments currently taking place.

Bored? Read more interesting and fun stuff at the blog of many things!