The Worst Game You'll Ever Love

Well, the reviewers hate it, but we here at FTM like it. The reviews I've read rank it 3 or less out of 10.  I would give it a 5 for it's stupid appeal. It's not the best, but its amusing with a goofy storyline and dopey character designs.  I recommend a rent or playing this one drunk for the more discriminating gamer.  For those who don't care about the quality of graphics and storyline, and aren't intimidated by half-naked unnaturally animated silly girls in skimpy clothes killing hundreds of zombies in a bloodfest free-for-all, then get ready to have some fun!

Be warned, though.  This game is not very attractive, and at some points in the game is downright ugly.  The graphics are PS2 quality, and animate fairly poorly.   The camera is annoying if you can't get a grip on the controls of it or whichever way it decides to swing.  They did put in an "auto-face" button, that will immediately position itself behind your character so you can see what the heck is going on.  The voice acting is horrible.  Awful.  In some of the cut scenes, there is no voice, and the characters are taken out of their in-game positions and thrown into a completely different scene with the action scripted totally different to what you were doing before the scene started to play.  If you want to read what's going on in the game, the text is filled with run-on sentences, bad punctuation, and words without proper spacing.  Somehow they are telling you a story about zombies, and the need for my blood for something, an experiment or a recipe for spaghetti or pizza sauce.

The zombies are dopey, and some even carry weapons that they don't use against you: chainsaws, table saws, gatling guns, etc.  They trundle about on the screen waiting for you to kill them as they crawl out of the ground, leaving no trail of evidence that they just climbed out of the ground.  They even climb out of unexpected areas: city parks, city streets, parking garages, mountain tops, trails.. doesn't anybody simply put the dead into cemeteries anymore?  The zombies die in barrels and buckets of blood that stain the ground and your character.  Your sword will also get blood-soaked, and will get stuck in a zombie if there's too much blood on it.  You'll have to shake it off every now and then.  The blood also builds your rage meter, which gives you a limited time of super strength that has to be used wisely, as your health meter will lower when you use some of your super-powerful moves.  That doesn't sound like a good game design, but I deal with it.  The zombies die in a Blade-like style.  They get chopped up, and the main parts sizzle away in a cloud of ash and sparks, leaving behind a collectible gold orb, clothing orb, red orb (chunks of some sort), and other objects.
 

Above: The Hospital

With all that said, it's really fun, sometimes only  in spurts.  There is a 2-player option, but it's offline multiplayer, and it's a serious throw-away multiplayer on a split-screen. Through much of the single player game you have control over two characters which you can alternate between.  This is helpful, as there are a few different characters that can be unlocked or downloaded and used in-game who have different abilities: guns, knives, explosive, etc.  You can unlock clothing and go into dress-up mode and, well... whatever.

You can rank up any character in Survival Mode, a poor-man's Horde Mode, and you can take your power-ups and leveled-up warrior chick into battle in the main story!  There are healing power ups, strength and speed power ups, and "bring your second character back to life" power ups.  You will get lost on some levels, but you will eventually stumble on the correct path.  When the zombies attack, they don't seem to always try to hurt you.  They notice you, they wander into you, and they stop like you were an obstacle.  Sometimes birds will attack, but they don't really animate.  They sometimes flap their wings, but most of the time they are sitting in mid-air, not flapping their wings. Ok..!  Boss battles are long, but easy if you've powered up your characters.  One boss battle had me fighting 2 giant bloody turd-like monsters with teeth that threw corpses at me!  By spinning around them with Annna (yes, with 3 n's) and her guns and grenades, I killed them with little trouble, it seems too easy when you level up your chick.  There are some boss battles, including the final boss, that play like a broken record.  When you defeat one patterned attack, there is another one, and another.  Then they are defeated.  I still have no idea why the big boss wants my blood.  Does it keep her young?  Does it taste good?  What does she need it for!

Below: Blood. Lots of it. And it's red.

Like all 360 games, there are achievements, but you need some sort of guide to get them.  Something like "Stand on your head while mixing drinks, on a skateboard, then call your mom collect from a pay phone."  They don't seem to be easy, but I'm sure some savants have them already. My wife hates videogames, she played it for 10 minutes, and said "You have issues". Translation of her comment, "It's perfect for you!"  Load times are an issue in this game, but they give you a chop-up mini-game where you are a super-deformed bikini chick slicing apart hoards of zombies for no reason other than to distract you from why the load time seems ridiculously long for a game that looks that bad.

Lastly, there is a  Dress-Up Mode  for the characters.  As you play and collect orbs, you will be able to purchase new (sexy?) clothes for your characters.  Remember, this is a Japanese games, and I guess that type of thing flies in Japan.  Here in America it is lonely boy silly and goofy.  But, it's a videogame, and, well, what do you expect?

In all, for $40, it's not the worst you can do with your money. There is another $20 in downloadable content.  It includes some new oddly-shapen female playable characters, but purchasing it would bring the title back to the usual price range of $60.  Do you really need to spend more money on more female characters that do the same thing as all of the other characters in the game, that is, to attempt sexy and kill tons of zombies.  Well, maybe.  But modesty forbids on that one.  To get through the whole game, that is, unlock everything, you have to play through it several times at each difficulty.  It will try your patience, but if you want to complete everything, then have at it.  Overall, we really enjoyed this title, and it was nice to not look at a fake muscular man running around killing things.  There is also an un-reviewed version of the game for the Nintendo Wii. 

Irreverent Puppet observations are available on video at the Einstein & Pencil Shavings YouTube!

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