 |
 |
|
| Jack's having a bad day... | Mind you, so are the zombies... |
I did like the title though, it held promise, sounded kind of literary. These things always do, you know.
Then, as I began to play, I realized that this game doesn't actually work. Much like an over sized can of soup, the functions of this game are so severely limited as to be dammed near pointless.
The hero of this game is your average Joe farmer. An average guy who finds one of the living dead propping up his doorstep one fine evening. Naturally he is a bit perturbed by this development as anyone would be, and realizes that he must kill, kill, kill them all before they tear the living flesh from his body and suck out his brain. Isn't it just the nature of zombies to get everywhere though, and so Jack (our country bumpkin) soon finds that he's not safe anywhere, not even in a cornfield. Well who would have thought that? Surely anyone who has seen any movie involving a cornfield realizes it's the last place you go when you're being hunted by anything. Forced to ditch the safety of the corn, Jack then fights his way to
Fiddler's Green, the fortified zombie free city.
Now I am not a huge fan of zombies myself. I'd be quite concerned, scared even, if I were ever to come across one. However the zombies in this game weren't quite cutting it for me. Perhaps it was the way that they didn't seem too overly concerned with killing me at times. Now maybe they had just had a feed of brains and were feeling kind of full, but surely zombies don't worry about their waistlines.. what happened to their insatiable appetites?
 |
 |
|
| Ring around the body, la la la... | Spare a quarter, buddy? |
They just weren't really motivated. I suspect a good visit from Tony Robbins would buck them up some. Perhaps make them realize that the smallest obstacles didn't have to impede their process, that they were the masters of their own destiny, and they didn't just have to stand there and take being shot like that.
Still, a zombie is a zombie, and deserves a good killing no matter how motivated. Thats what I reckon. I also reckon that a golf club ain't the best weapon for killing a zombie, and I don't care what anyone says, with America's gun control laws, any farmer type is going to have a freakin' arsenal at the ready for any zombie attacks. So lets not pretend that the pathetic amount of weaponry available in the game reflects reality. If they ever run out of Marines, America could simply mobilize the Midwest in terms of firepower.
Basically, this is a zombie killing game in which its not that much fun to kill zombies. Interesting. Perhaps its some sort of statement on the futility of life in general and the nature of man working against his environment. Or maybe it's just kind of crap. The guns seem to fire haphazardly, I suppose a reference to the way my characters terror stricken hands are shaking with fear, thus forcing him to dispatch zombies with shots to the knees. Vampires have to be staked through the heart, but apparently blowing off random appendages will do some zombies right in. I guess that makes vampires better than zombies, as if there were any contest, anyway, that's not the issue at hand here. The issue is this "game".
It really doesn't work very well at all, thats really the issue. The physics of zombie killing are all screwed to hell, and the environments themselves leave a lot to be desired with poor level design and rendering. I mean, not everything has an edge guys. Apparently they ran out of "round" money in the budget,
because parts of this game look like the environments were hacked out of design programmes by
angry wee computer dwarves.
 |
 |
|
| Some zombies are such posers... | Ew, at last, crispy dimembered living dead girl, just what we were looking for... |
The zombies themselves look okay at times, which is rather nice, and some of the bloody
Top Game Moment: The name "Fiddler's Green". God that's a great name.
LAND OF THE DEAD: ROAD TO FIDDLER'S GREEN VERDICT
bits are kind of satisfying, but only if you imagine it’s the blood of people who make bad games. If you do play this game, then you’re going to be doing that a lot.
TOP GAME MOMENT
The name “Fiddler’s Green”. God that’s a great name.
