Nintendo Wii U
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Product Features

Genre
Action and Shooter
Publisher
Ubisoft
Release Date
November 30, 2012
Available Platforms
Nintendo Wii U

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ZombiU

TWO SCREENS, TWICE THE FEAR- Feel the tension mount as you try to keep an eye on your TV and controller screen. SURVIVAL-HORROR AT ITS BEST- Resources are in short supply while your enemies are legion you never know when you will find more weapons, ammunition, first aid and food. Use them wisely! DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT YOUR BOB- The new controller becomes your Bug-Out Bag the ultimate all-in-one survival kit for your tools, inventory, med kits, maps and more. UNIQUE DEATH MECHANIC- If you die, you wake up to play an entirely new character who is another survivor in the same terrifying position. You will want to recover your old BOB, now worn by the last character you played...who is now a zombie! HORDE AT YOUR DOOR- Prepare yourself for the inevitable onslaught. Stock up on guns, ammo and...

  • George Orton July 25, 2013 WIIU
    ****

    ZombiU was one of the WiiU's launch titles, and as well as being an enjoyable zombie-fighting/survival game, it's also the game that best shows off some of the new possibilities of the console's second-screen gamepad - as well as proving that Nintendo's innovative new console is certainly not just for kids.

    You play the part of a human who's struggling to survive in the wake of a zombie apocalypse in present-day London. Whilst that might not sound like the most original setup - zombies have been pretty much done-to-death (no pun intended) in movies and games for quite a while now - the way the game handles the subject matter helps to make it seem a little fresher than a lot of bog-standard zombie games you might have played.

    For one thing, the way the game treats death is pretty original. If your character dies, they die for good: there's no going back and restarting with them from an earlier point in the game - they're dead. This doesn't mean the end of the game for the player, however, as you can restart as a different human character. But in doing so, it's quite likely that you'll encounter your previous character - now turned into a zombie version of their former self - and you'll have to kill them again if you want to recover your previous inventory of items.

    Talking of which, there's a fairly wide range of items you can use in this game to see off your enemies. As well as the obligatory guns, you can despatch your zombie foes with weapons as varied as cricket bats, crossbows, or even molotov cocktails. This lends a certain amount of variety to an otherwise fairly repetitive game, and one that's more notable for its use of the WiiU's technology than anything else.

    Because as I mentioned earlier, this is perhaps the game that makes best use of the WiiU's interactive touch-screen gamepad. The developers have clearly put a lot of thought into the possibilities offered by the second-screen controller, and have sought to make use of it as often as possible and in as diverse a way as possible. Depending on where you are in the game, the touch-screen can serve as a map, as a breakdown of your inventory, as a radar to warn of imminent danger, as a speaker for radio transmissions you intercept in the game, or even as a scope for a sniper rifle. It can also be used to effect certain in-game actions like barricading doors, picking locks or looking at documents in detail.

    In fact, you'll often find yourself using both screens simultaneously to get the best out of the game. And a neat little touch is that when you hold up your gamepad in real-life to check the radar (for example), the game shows your character using a similar device on-screen, helping to avoid the possibility of breaking the "reality" of the game by switching between screens so often.

    But if there's any real area of weakness in ZombiU, it's with the story. The character-switching mechanism means that you can never really invest in the character you're playing as - because they could be taken away from you and replaced with someone else at any moment. To make up for this, the developers have tried to fill the game with some interesting secondary characters - most notably the leader of the heroes, an mysterious and enigmatic ex-army guy known only as "the Prepper", who masterminds the resistance from his secret "safehouse" hideout. There's also an attempt to make things feel more real and immediate by including lots of real-life London locations such as the Tower of London, Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace. But even so, ZombiU can't escape the feeling that its story is a little bit under-developed and - ironically enough for a zombie game - not quite as fleshed-out as it should be.

    In the end, it feels like ZombiU is as much a testing ground for the new technology of the WiiU as an attempt to make a great game in its own right. In that sense, it succeeds, because it'll have you doing things with the WiiU gamepad that you've probably never done before - and for that reason alone, I'd recommend it to early-adopters of the console (like me) as being well worth checking out. When viewed in the context of the kind of A-list console games that we've been treated to in the last couple of years, however, it's hard to claim that it's as objectively good. It's pretty immersive and certainly very innovative, but it's perhaps not as exciting or involving as it could have been.