Zombi

Fancy an extreme zombie survival experience, looking for a game with good weapons and realistic play? Look no further than Zombi, an extremely well made horror game that gives a hard line approach to life after the apocalypse.

You begin the game, lost in London and directed by a survivalist known as the prepper, a man on the other end of a radio guiding and keeping you safe throughout. The very first moment the game loads up you know you are in for a ride. You can select normal or chicken mode or hard mode. In hard mode you cannot come back once you die, in the other modes you can, and each time you re spawn as a new character. That could be a police man, an office manager, a plumber, a seemingly endless amount of characters actually makes you bond with yours, as I did, I didn’t want my super personal character to die! After completing the game I attempted numerous times to survive on hard mode, with disastrous results. I got very far into the game and then bang, killed. Take the advice and play normal or chicken just to adapt to the very harsh reality of the game, that it is extremely difficult.

Once you have played the brief introduction and escaped the zombies and run to the safe house, you will be established and ready. The prepper, who set up the base in the London tube station, tells you to fix the electric and gather your only guaranteed weapon, a baseball bat and collect your bug out bag, coming in varying sizes throughout the game. Already the realism is insane, stuck in a tub station, with a small bed and a crate which you can store things and CCTV monitors which guide you to your new mission.

Anyone expecting fantastic graphics and insane melee combat shouldn’t play the game with high expectations in those areas. The constant hitting with the baseball bat becomes annoying but also adds to the tension. Instead, to bring the fun out in London, try looting and scanning with your pad to find pistols, rifles and automatic weapons, but be wary, ammo is sacred.

Close combat is a no no, the game is always going to win when you run into a group of 3 or more zombies with nothing more than a nearly empty pistol and no chocolate bar or med kit. The zombies are ridiculously strong and can kill you in two to three hits if not careful. This makes it a game which requires a careful approach, a planned one.

Missions are better than I expected and scary. They take part in the back streets of London to the well known locations such as Buckingham palace and Tower of London. Getting there is no easy task, keep it light and only carry the bare minimum when travelling long distances. If you are lucky you can find a sewer entrance and fast travel back to base if you get surrounded, don’t rely on this or safe houses however, because the zombies are faster than you think. Survivors are very few and extremely rare, they only appear in the actual missions themselves and make it feel like the world really has ended. After all, what is the apocalypse if it is full of people? Instead, these people have goals and missions and aren’t wandering without purpose as is the case in many other games.

As the game progresses and you unlock more weapons, some of the killing gets easier, some of the travelling gets easier especially as you scan more remote CCTV boxes, which are linked to your safe house monitors. During the game, there are notes, there are recording and other collectibles which themselves hide a story and revelations.

It’s difficult and it’s annoying when you keep dying and coming back as a new character, but that is also a driving force. It is realistic and extremely tense. The lighting is dark throughout and in some areas you cannot see at all without your limited battery torch. All these things make it a fun and re-playable game. I will go back to it because the atmosphere and story line are brilliant.

This game is worth 4/5