I’ve recently played a lot of games, but among those, two require some talking on them, but don’t really need separate posts. I’m talking about ADR1FT and ZOMBI (also known as ZOMBIU).
ADR1FT is marketed strongly as a VR game. And since I’ve played it without VR, I probably didn’t experience it “as intended”. Still, it has a lot to be talked about without VR, some good, a lot of not really.
Given that it’s an Unreal Engine 4 game, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it looks really good. I was quite surprised, in fact, at when the animations was often reused or the fact that the little water droplets that hang in weightlessness don’t have some cool physics attached to them, because everything looked so good. It feels pretty good too – there’s right amount of this feeling of being lost and helpless above the Earth in a half-broken barely working remains of a space station, and a right amount of feeling how absolutely beautiful this actually is. With some additional tweaks, smart scenario and event design, the basic concept of “your movement is tied to your air” on a broken space station could be so absolutely amazing…
But it’s not. It’s the same things happening 4 times with slight variations. Instead of nice tense character relationship explored we have a character per section thing, where the character is explored a lot and then pretty much forgotten for the rest of the game. And you really do the same things using same animations over and over again. It’s a fantastic concept and there’s nothing like this right now, not that I can think of, at least. And yet, it’s so pointless and boring.
ZOMBI (or as it was originally released on WiiU – ZOMBIU) is a different kind of beast. It’s a rather amazing attempt at making a first person survival horror game with more modern ideas. It even follows some of the concepts that I’ve mentioned in my post on the “Modern face of survival horror” – it borrows from a different franchise that has similarities with what classic survival horror was about. The Souls games. In fact, the original WiiU version even allowed the players to leave online messages to other players and their zombified dead characters could “invade” other people’s games.
But basically, ZOMBI takes few bits from modern survival game elements, few bits from survival action games, tiny little bit from Dead Island, a lot of concepts with exploration, item management and slow combat from classic survival horror, and few bits from the Souls games. Now, apart from the mentioned online elements, that are sadly gone in the new port of the game, another thing that reminds of Souls is the idea that death is part of the gameplay. If you die, and if the zombie actually grabs and bites you, you die instantly, this character permanently dies and you continue as a new character. All of the things that you had in your safehouse item box are there, but everything you had on you as you died remains on your now zombified player character. This, combined with the fact that the game really tries to push survival and lack of helpful items, makes for a nice tense slow paced game, where you explore locations for some goodies, avoid enemies as much as possible and backtrack a lot, but in a fun way.
And I would’ve loved it if not for the fact, that it often feels just not particularly fun. The items are so scarce that you need to use really slow melee a lot of the time, which is both tense (since zombies are very dangerous in close range) and boring (this takes forever). Having new melee weapons from the port doesn’t help, as they take up limited space and for some reason only the basic melee weapon is unremovable, and they can’t be swapped. Limited space is ridiculously limited, so you are punished for being good too. And even the item box is limited, so the logical “go out to scavenge” strategy doesn’t apply either. There are way too many forced action moments that just don’t work with the controls. And there are special zombie types which are simply unnecessary and annoying more than anything. Also look stupid. But then, the actually curious story setup is also ridiculously dumb as it unfolds and it never provides anything that it could provide.
Still, a great effort and something to learn from, even if not a particularly good game. PC port is surprisingly nice, I thought, but then – a lot of people seemed to have issues.
P.S. And as a little bonus, I decided to give I am Alive another try and… no. Got bored again. Such a fantastic concept, actual psychological combat, rather than shooty bang bang like in The Last of Us, actual attempts at making modern platforming a challenge. But it’s so ugly and boring… Watching some longplay is a fine way to learn about the game, though.