There's a Catch-22 in ZombiU , and it's “survival.” Listing the things that ZombiU does well calls out the importance the game places on trying to survive, but focusing that spotlight on survival makes the game’s shortcomings all the more glaring.

“ The trouble is, ZombiU doesn’t do enough with this stuff.

There's no real narrative to ZombiU, and that's fine. The game isn't trying to tell you the next great video game story, and some of its nonsensical points are actually its coolest. See, you start as a survivor in a subway station, a voice over the PA gives you your first mission, and you're off -- whacking zombies with a cricket bat, collecting samples and so on.The voice gives you missions, you unlock shortcuts and even run into some other characters, but the whole point of ZombiU is to survive for as long as you can. Because once you’re bitten, your character is dead. Literally. The survivor goes down and you respawn back at the subway station as a new character who somehow knows everything your old character knew and is ready to pick up the task at hand. Again, it makes no sense when you think about it, but it’s a really cool game mechanic for ZombiU. The title tracks how long each survivor has been alive and tallies a score based on your performance, so there's this metagame of trying to beat your best playthroughs, which are uploaded to the online leaderboards for the world to see.Even cooler, when one of your characters goes down, your next character has to trudge out to the spot of the previous character’s demise to bash the former you's zombie brains in and collect all the items they had looted and were carrying. It's like Demon's Souls. But with zombies and those British guards in the funny hats. If you’re super-hardcore, you can play through a mode where you have just one life to live.All of that’s cool, and that’s what sucks about ZombiU. The game has all these great ideas, but it doesn't have the gameplay or polish to back them up. Moving around in ZombiU, I felt like I was a camera on a Segway -- gliding across environments and making big wide turns. The levels are dark and spooky, but the game just doesn't look that good. Textures are blocky, zombies clip through walls, and there's nothing I can think of as a truly visually impressive moment in the game.But that's all superfluous compared to ZombiU's greatest flaw: combat. From the get-go, you have a cricket bat as your default weapon. It can't be broken, it doesn't need to be reloaded, and each survivor starts with it. During demos, the idea of creeping through the darkness only to come out and give a foe a good wallop seemed cool -- it didn't matter that it took a few hits to KO the ghoul. But that feeling wears off pretty quickly in the final version for ZombiU.Zombie after zombie takes multiple hits with the cricket bat to bring down. I’m talking about five or more whacks on the noggin to finally fell the foe and give me the chance for the killing blow. It gets to the point where it's just a chore to deal with them. I tried tapping the attack button, holding the hit button and aiming at different extremities, but there was no way to dispatch the undead quicker.Here's where we get to "survival" being a double-edged sword. I don't need ZombiU's combat to be over the top like Dead Island or Dead Rising; I enjoy the idea of this game being a slower foray that wants me to sneak past zombies and penalizes me for engaging the undead. But that's not the case here.Time after time, biters populated ZombiU hallways that I had to get through; they’d pop out of corridors I had to pass. Even using flares, which distract even the hungriest of the undead, only gets you so far. You have to fight in ZombiU, and the combat just isn't satisfying or fun.Part of this is ZombiU’s design. Zombies almost always come at you in manageable groups of two or three, so it feels like they're there to be engaged but still be beatable. Toss in the number of hits it takes to kill them, and zombie encounters often feel like they're just padding the game to make it longer. Of course, there are other weapons -- complete with a basic upgrade system -- like a shotgun and crossbow, but these make noise and ammo is limited.And that limited ammo brings us back to another great idea that's sunk by survival hiccups. When you kill a foe or stumble upon a filing cabinet, you can loot it. What this means in terms of gameplay is that your onscreen character drops to one knee to go through his or her backpack and you need to manage your inventory via the Wii U GamePad -- dragging and dropping items into you inventory.The trouble is, ZombiU doesn’t do enough with this stuff. The majority of things I looted were already empty and a waste of time. You can only loot in very specific places, so the survival idea of scrounging through every trash at and box is never realized and breaks the zombie simulator vibe.If you’re looking for a multiplayer fix, ZombiU has another good idea that isn’t fleshed out all the way. Here one player uses the Wii U GamePad and another uses the Wiimote or Pro Controller. The Wii U GamePad player gets to drop zombie troops into the level inhabited by the traditional player who is trying to survive or capture flags. I had fun playing, but there’s no denying the mode is shallow. It’s just three modes for two players with no online option. I’m sure some people will get really into the light strategy of it all and have epic fights, but most will pass this mode by without a second thought.