Hands on ZombiU

Aim for the head!

Ubisoft’s Wii U title that has been passed around and casually looked at by press and gamers is something of a mystery. At this year’s E3, I was able to watch some people play a mode of the game where a single player fought hordes of zombies that came in waves as they held a point down. What I got to experience first hand at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend was an entirely different story.

Jumping into the shoes of a survivor, I had to escape Buckingham Palace and survive the zombie hordes within. Inside, I had to scrounge for ammo to go with my handgun and the Royal Guard carbine that I had looted off the ground. The people at the demo booth told me that the game relies heavily on survival and tactical instincts, making you really conserve your ammo and get down and dirty with the zombies if you have to.

That made sense as I only had eight rounds for my pistol and three rounds for my carbine. But what I did have was an unlimited supply of skull bashings thanks to my handy-dandy cricket bat. Very “Shaun of the Dead” if you ask me. And like Shaun, I aimed for the head and cracked a few zombies in the skull a few times to make sure they were good and double-dead.

That's pretty much how it looks when you play the game.

The game’s menu is on the Wii U gamepad, so instead of having to press pause, you just look down and slide the inventory in to view, and the game on the screen pauses while you rummage through your pack to figure out what you want to use or discard. Now, this is a really interesting use of the gamepad and I actually liked it. What was hard was that the mini-map was down there as well, and having to look at my hands while also running on the screen was a little difficult. Especially when little red blips show up on it to tell you where zombies are and you don’t immediately look at the controller to see if there’s danger. It’s going to take a lot for gamers to get used to that on Nintendo’s new system.

The graphics were good. They were passable for current-gen systems but nothing too impressive for a next-gen machine. I suppose that’s actually a compliment for a Nintendo console as they’ve never been the most graphically-intensive machines on the market. Often times, if you crack a shot off at a zombie’s head, you might actually give them a real close haircut and expose their brain.

Zombie John!

Something fun was that when I actually died in the demo, I was put in the place of another survivor and I actually encountered my past-self in game as a zombie. When I killed that version of me, I could loot myself and get all of my previous items back. That kind of reminded me of the old "Diablo II" mechanic where you could loot your corpse. Something fun they were doing at the booth was also allowing you to use the camera on the Wii U to zombify yourself and I was told that you could even put zombie-you in "ZombiU."

All in all I think that “ZombiU” might present an interesting experience for a title on the Wii U. The game isn’t anything new, but it utilizes enough of the technology available in the system for it to be somewhat interesting to people who pick it up for the first time. I’m equating it to “Red Steel.” Hopefully it is much more refined and well executed than the other Ubisoft flop. Keep your eyes out for this game to come out Dec. 31.