In most forms of zombie fiction, zombies come with the truly terrifying ability to easily convert a regular healthy human into one of the living dead with something as simple as a single bite. Even someone can escape a battle with a zombie or is facing the weakest of their ranks, the ease of infection adds a layer of tension to any encounter as they’re always at least somewhat at risk of being doomed to degrade into a mindless man eater. While this part of the zombie identity is found throughout almost all media that features them, the video game world tends to shy away from this trait, partially because anything that can abruptly doom the player to die is viewed quite negatively. In other zombie stories, the person who gets infected serves a narrative purpose, but in a video game, if the player’s character is bitten, then you’re likely interfering with their ability to participate in the rest of the story.

ZombiU, however, decided to fully integrate the fear of immediate infection into its design. In ZombiU, you do not play as some well-defined character. Instead, someone called The Prepper is on the search for survivors lost in London after a zombie plague has changed nearly everyone into one of the living dead. The character you play as has a name and former profession, but they aren’t truly a character, as they are, by design, expendable. If a zombie does manage to catch you in ZombiU, it can lead to an immediate end for the current character you’re using, the character dying and turning into a zombie themselves. In Survival mode, that is the end of the story. If you want to play ZombiU more from there, you have to start all over again from the very beginning. While an interesting challenge no doubt, ZombiU also offers a much more interesting mode conceptually, where after a character dies, you start to play again as a new survivor The Prepper has found in London. Your gear from the previous life is gone, the new survivor given a small starting set of a gun, cricket bat, and flashlight, but if you go to where you died previously, you can find your old character as a zombie and kill them to loot your old gear. In an interesting touch, you can even encounter the zombies of other people who have played ZombiU, and their backpacks often come with a bit of swag as well. If you die twice on your way to retrieving your gear though, it’s gone for good, save for the weapons you had that are scattered to the winds to be found again later. Despite that somewhat rare but devastating possible outcome, the item retrieval method feels pretty ingenious, as it adds some decent stakes to literally every zombie encounter in the game. Zombies aren’t always going to go straight for the bite either so it’s not always a battle of avoiding an instant death attack, there being a regular health bar for you to manage as they swipe at you instead. The game also later gives you a special item to get you out of a zombie bite once before it needs a refill, so the game bends a little to avoid being too overwhelming with its threat of instant death while still keeping that degree of tension to even the most basic encounter.

Another interesting concept ZombiU has for making things suspenseful is that, outside of actually pausing the game, there are no moments of guaranteed safety. If you want to open your backpack to pull out a weapon or use a health item, your character has to set their kit down and rummage through it, leaving them open to attack. You can set some easy access short cuts to the bottom screen to overcome this being a constant issue, but there are times where you’ll need to do something that demands your attention. Whether it’s picking locks, busting boards off barricaded doors, opening manholes, or reading the papers you pick up explaining the zombie plague, all these actions are done in real time, meaning you must watch over your shoulder for any approaching zombies. Their lethal nature makes this even more risky, and these moments of trying to manage your attention between the T.V. screen and your Wii U gamepad probably explains some of the game’s gimmickry. To open a barricade or manhole you need to tap the image of it on your touchscreen a few times, which doesn’t really add much to the task itself but does limit your ability to respond to a potential zombie threat. Do you have the time to open that manhole or bust that barricade down on the gamepad before you are attacked by zombies? …Well, usually yes if you’re smart about it, but there can be moments where you might wish for an easy escape but it is blocked by the touch screen gimmickry that is deliberately obtuse just to put you on edge. Some things like having to flick the gamepad up to zoom in with a sniper rifle are truly just Ubisoft futzing around with the features of the then new Wii U gamepad though, as it feels like a pointless maneuver when a button could have done just as well. The gamepad also has a map showing that later gets a radar ping to help you know when zombies are in the area though, so some tension is sacrificed for practical gameplay so that ambushes don’t end a Survival run unfairly.

So far, ZombiU has impressed with two ideas that really make ZombiU work as a horror game. The stakes are high, and it’s hard to find a reprieve since you leave yourself vulnerable doing most everything. If it had stayed with those as its angles for horror, ZombiU would have likely turned out much better, but there’s one more thing they added to try and tap into the survival horror angle, and that’s making the player generally limited on ammo. It’s actually a classic direction many horror games with guns take, and it can work in making enemies feel like threats because you can’t just shoot them all to death and keep moving. ZombiU, unfortunately, has a little problem called the cricket bat. ZombiU does hand you weapons over the course of play and will give you ammo for them as you move along. The weapons are actually effective as well, with things like shotguns, machine guns, rifles, and pistols for the guns, as well as items like explosives or zombie-distracting flares to give you some special items with different effects for dealing with enemies. If you die though, you lose all of these until you retrieve them, and if they are scattered about, it’s almost not worth the effort finding them again because of how much danger you’ll put yourself in. You can use CCTV cameras to find areas with useful items, but it’s often better to just keep on the main story where the game gives you new weapons and ammo at a reasonable pace rather than chasing down one item in a zombie infested area you’ve visited before.

No matter your approach though, the cricket bat is your last line of defense, always usable when you’re out of ammo. It requires getting close to zombies to hit them, but it stuns them perfectly if it hits, leaving them unable to attack until your next swing is ready. The problem is, the cricket bat is weak, and it can take up to five slow blows sometimes to put down a single zombie. Since it is important to conserve ammo due to its scarcity, the best option in many low risk encounters with zombies is to whip out the bat and engage in the tedium of slowly clubbing them to death. You can try to ignore the zombie and run past them, but while a single zombie is easy, a horde can clutter hallways and provide many opportunities for the undead to land their bites on you. If you don’t deal with the zombie, it will chase after you and potentially bunch up with others into a problem you can no longer ignore and are now worse equipped for dealing with. Your backpacks start off small as well, meaning you’ll run out of ammo quicker until you get some upgrades, so the cricket bat is likely to become an unwelcome companion, one that could be much more tolerable if it just killed zombies in half the time. In fact, the ammo limitations likely limit the design of the areas. Very few huge hordes of zombies attack, the game usually placing one to three in an area so you aren’t overwhelmed if you are down to just the bat. The areas with a lot of zombies tend to give you some way to deal with them too like mounted machine guns or explosive pick-ups nearby, and the zombies also come in some fairly basic designs since again, the game can’t push you too hard if you could conceivably only be on just a weak cricket bat. Besides the generic zombie you find in most areas of the game, most of the special zombie types are just a bit more durable, move faster, or deal more damage, the only ones that really feel different from the crowd being an exploding variant and the spitter zombie who attacks from afar. This lack in variety is made worse by the ammo limitations as most battles blend together rather than allowing the player to breeze through weaker moments to get to more exciting confrontations. There is a “chicken” difficulty that tries to deal with this, but that makes the ammo more abundant and cricket bat more effective without any change in the zombie design. If you’re stronger but the zombies stay the same, the tension is completely sacrificed along with the tedium, whereas a better difficulty balancing of the game would ensure the zombies could still put up a fight despite an able and equipped player.

London does make for an interesting setting for zombie killing though. Even those unfamiliar with the city will know of places like the London Underground and Buckingham Palace, and the less famous areas make for urban settings with a touch of historical design. Cramped halls in buildings, wide open streets, dark warehouses and the grimy sewers all mix up the way the game can hide loot and zombies, and there are usually some optional areas to investigate to find more helpful items and more trouble. Areas of London are connected by shortcuts for easier traversal as the game takes you back and forth for plot reasons or to retrieve items, and there are areas where you can rest to save and upgrade your weapons. Your exploration of the city is actually guided by a few different characters, with each new character having their own take on how to survive the apocalypse and how you can help them with their angle, whether that be riding it out, escaping, or trying to do something to cure the plague. You end up pulled in many different directions, although the fact you keep changing characters as you die along the way is never really addressed that well and the endings you can get don’t really wrap thing up conclusively. The last major touch to the experience is a multiplayer mode with an interesting concept, one player being in charge of placing zombies in an area as the other walks about killing them while completing objectives. The interplay between how good the loot is for the survivor and the amount of zombies the overlord can place seems reasonable, but it’s not really complex or kinetic enough to hook players long term.

THE VERDICT: ZombiU manages to make its zombies just as threatening as the kinds found in cinema and literature, finally letting them use their lethal bites in the game world while accommodating it with a unique revival system. The consequence of death being so high can make even a single zombie terrifying if it catches you at a bad moment, and the game adds another interesting complication with the need to split your attention between more involved tasks like inventory management and making sure the area around you is safe. Sadly, the last complication pushes things away from being interesting horror into slightly tedious gameplay, as low ammo reserves either ask you to fall back on boring practicality or waste your more exciting and explosive options before they’re truly needed. Having to retrieve your good equipment from your zombified former self is a good moment of weakness, but even if you collect your old gear, the ammo is so scarce that you can fall into dull cricket bat combat if you want to be ready for the moments the game throws some interesting zombie arrangements at you. The ammo isn’t so limited that it ruins the experience, but its an unnecessary albatross around the neck of a game that had much more interesting ideas to experiment with than a survival horror staple that feels somewhat out of place.

And so, I give ZombiU for the Wii U…

An OKAY rating. While it would later get released on other platforms as simply Zombi, it seems that ZombiU didn’t shake its largest problem even after those rereleases, that being its ammo balancing. ZombiU doesn’t really punish you for your wastefulness so much as force you into boring battles by design, as zombies are too abundant not to deal with for fear they’ll follow you and land those lethal hits. Making the cricket bat more powerful would be a good way to speed up the moments you don’t have ammo, but perhaps the better angle would be to up its power and up the amount of ammo while also making the zombies more formidable rather than durable. Right now they fit into a manageable area, but there could be more types of enemies, more moments of horde attacks, and more creative zombie arrangements if the player was more capable of dealing with such things. Right now, a lot of the thrill in the game comes from the almost omnipresent danger of instant loss, and when the game embraces that, it makes for some memorable moments of panic and survival. More foes like the exploding zombie or spitter would make the cricket bat less useful even with a buff, so the design can actually account for it with a bit of thinking.

ZombiU had some incredible angles dragged down by a subpar one, meaning ZombiU has to claw its way just to reach mediocrity. It can still manage to be one of the most tense zombie games yet made because of what worked, it just seems to use up a lot of inspiration before it started building what should have been a solid backbone of fundamentals that could support its creative mechanics.