This review is a coda to my other piece on ZombiU. Although reading it may not be necessary, it will help to address anything I leave out here.
Inspired by the movie 28 Days Later, a small team within Valve, formerly contracted to work on a Counter-Strike spin-off with a long and notorious development cycle began to work on a side-project for the company that involved surviving against hordes of the undead. The project originally used Counter-Strike as a base. The final product was anything but.
Left4Dead, along with many of the other zombie games inspired by famous movies, ultimately comes down to a power fantasy draped in darkness and horror motifs. You and your friends are the only ones who can withstand hordes of the undead, special undead that can maul you in about five to six different ways, and gym bros who never let death keep them from lifting. If you struggle, it's something to laugh at with your friends.
ZombiU stands out over a decade later for a few reasons. Among them being how evidently rushed its production was; you don't need an episode of What Happened? to tell you that canceling one launch title for a console that's barely a year off before announcing another one by the same team obviously meant a fair bit of ambition had to be left off the table. But for as janky as it can be, it gets what made 28 Days Later tick. There's a layer of vulnerability present in its game mechanics that you just don't get in Resident Evil, and a lot of that comes down to just how fucking cumbersome it is to use the Wii U gamepad for anything. I've heard a lot of people call it a basic controller gimmick in the past, and I've said as much to appease them. But if you want my honest-to-god opinion (formed through my playtime and that of others I've viewed), I believe it's a great example of video games as an art form. It takes moments from similar movies that instill fear and adds a layer of context to them that makes it that much worse. The Wii U gamepad, as a storytelling device, was pitch-fucking-perfect for horror games, but sadly got overlooked due to its home console's target audience, poor sales, and even worse marketing. ZombiU, for all of its unfortunate downsides, is not something that has been replicated since, and will probably never be replicated again.
Case in point? That time they tried to replicate it.
I'm going to contradict my past self here, but this rerelease absolutely reeks of desperation. Although ZombiU eventually sold a million copies, it was almost immediately cited as a financial disappointment by Ubisoft's (shady) CEO. Any plans for a sequel became a stillborn dream. Hoping to squeeze some money out of it, Ubisoft contacted Straight Right, a studio whose only other non-Wii U game was a port of Need for Speed: Shift 2 for iOS. Prior to Zombi, their only other work consisted of Wii U ports for Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
The end result? For an uncomfortably long time, you literally could not play the PC port without circumventing its DRM, even if you owned a legal copy of the game through Steam. That guide I linked to was originally posted in January of 2021; the actual patch came out ten months later. During that ten-month period, they were still selling the game for at least twenty dollars without any warning on the Steam page.
Let that set the precedent for what I am about to tell you. Zombi is the absolute worst way to experience ZombiU. This is a bottom-of-the-barrel port that makes a few welcome quality-of-life changes, but otherwise absolutely guts what made the original game unique, to begin with. I'll start by saying that, fundamentally, they've done fuck-all in terms of approaching this as a remaster. It does run at higher resolutions, but that's about it. If ZombiU's visuals had aged gracefully, this wouldn't be a complaint. If they aren't touching up the visuals, maybe they're doing it to preserve a classic. Here's the thing: ZombiU isn't a classic. As I said, it has issues. Most, if not all, of the things it gets right have to do with the Gamepad. By awkwardly merging both screens onto one without any of the thought or care that the original game had toward cultivating a tense and uncertain atmosphere, at best, they've turned a potentially terrifying game into a funny one. At worst? You'd be hard-pressed to see a zombie popping up. Rushed to market as it was, ZombiU was careful about divvying up what it showed you, lest one screen become too cluttered to navigate. In a game about situational awareness, everything being on one screen borks the entire experience. Zombi is the theatrical cut of ZombiU, Harrison Ford's narration and all. And boy is it not the experience you'd want to have playing this game.
A good solution would have been to maybe enforce a second screen mechanic, like on your phone or on another device like a laptop. Think of how Fallout 4 has a companion app that lets you dig through your Pip-Boy in real-time. But it would be foolish to assume that such a thing would be properly maintained when this port was so rushed that not even the haphazardly implemented multiplayer mode from the original could be carried over.
I'm still proud that this is the game that gave me enough attention to keep wanting to write these reviews. But all of these years later, it's... not good.
Inspired by the movie 28 Days Later, a small team within Valve, formerly contracted to work on a Counter-Strike spin-off with a long and notorious development cycle began to work on a side-project for the company that involved surviving against hordes of the undead. The project originally used Counter-Strike as a base. The final product was anything but.
Left4Dead, along with many of the other zombie games inspired by famous movies, ultimately comes down to a power fantasy draped in darkness and horror motifs. You and your friends are the only ones who can withstand hordes of the undead, special undead that can maul you in about five to six different ways, and gym bros who never let death keep them from lifting. If you struggle, it's something to laugh at with your friends.
ZombiU stands out over a decade later for a few reasons. Among them being how evidently rushed its production was; you don't need an episode of What Happened? to tell you that canceling one launch title for a console that's barely a year off before announcing another one by the same team obviously meant a fair bit of ambition had to be left off the table. But for as janky as it can be, it gets what made 28 Days Later tick. There's a layer of vulnerability present in its game mechanics that you just don't get in Resident Evil, and a lot of that comes down to just how fucking cumbersome it is to use the Wii U gamepad for anything. I've heard a lot of people call it a basic controller gimmick in the past, and I've said as much to appease them. But if you want my honest-to-god opinion (formed through my playtime and that of others I've viewed), I believe it's a great example of video games as an art form. It takes moments from similar movies that instill fear and adds a layer of context to them that makes it that much worse. The Wii U gamepad, as a storytelling device, was pitch-fucking-perfect for horror games, but sadly got overlooked due to its home console's target audience, poor sales, and even worse marketing. ZombiU, for all of its unfortunate downsides, is not something that has been replicated since, and will probably never be replicated again.
Case in point? That time they tried to replicate it.
I'm going to contradict my past self here, but this rerelease absolutely reeks of desperation. Although ZombiU eventually sold a million copies, it was almost immediately cited as a financial disappointment by Ubisoft's (shady) CEO. Any plans for a sequel became a stillborn dream. Hoping to squeeze some money out of it, Ubisoft contacted Straight Right, a studio whose only other non-Wii U game was a port of Need for Speed: Shift 2 for iOS. Prior to Zombi, their only other work consisted of Wii U ports for Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
The end result? For an uncomfortably long time, you literally could not play the PC port without circumventing its DRM, even if you owned a legal copy of the game through Steam. That guide I linked to was originally posted in January of 2021; the actual patch came out ten months later. During that ten-month period, they were still selling the game for at least twenty dollars without any warning on the Steam page.
Let that set the precedent for what I am about to tell you. Zombi is the absolute worst way to experience ZombiU. This is a bottom-of-the-barrel port that makes a few welcome quality-of-life changes, but otherwise absolutely guts what made the original game unique, to begin with. I'll start by saying that, fundamentally, they've done fuck-all in terms of approaching this as a remaster. It does run at higher resolutions, but that's about it. If ZombiU's visuals had aged gracefully, this wouldn't be a complaint. If they aren't touching up the visuals, maybe they're doing it to preserve a classic. Here's the thing: ZombiU isn't a classic. As I said, it has issues. Most, if not all, of the things it gets right have to do with the Gamepad. By awkwardly merging both screens onto one without any of the thought or care that the original game had toward cultivating a tense and uncertain atmosphere, at best, they've turned a potentially terrifying game into a funny one. At worst? You'd be hard-pressed to see a zombie popping up. Rushed to market as it was, ZombiU was careful about divvying up what it showed you, lest one screen become too cluttered to navigate. In a game about situational awareness, everything being on one screen borks the entire experience. Zombi is the theatrical cut of ZombiU, Harrison Ford's narration and all. And boy is it not the experience you'd want to have playing this game.
A good solution would have been to maybe enforce a second screen mechanic, like on your phone or on another device like a laptop. Think of how Fallout 4 has a companion app that lets you dig through your Pip-Boy in real-time. But it would be foolish to assume that such a thing would be properly maintained when this port was so rushed that not even the haphazardly implemented multiplayer mode from the original could be carried over.
I'm still proud that this is the game that gave me enough attention to keep wanting to write these reviews. But all of these years later, it's... not good.
2 Comments
@LoneSpeedsterDX Thank you!
LoneSpeedsterDX
9 months ago