It’s 4 a.m and you can’t sleep. The neighbors have been banging on doors, shattering windows, screaming and shooting off firearms all night. Damn them! You decide to get up and give them what for. After all, you have to work in the morning. You get outside and tell the bloodied mob gathered near the neighbors’ door to kindly shut the hell up, that they’re being discourteous, could they please keep it down? Of course they won’t listen because they’re f’ing zombies, but that’s beside the point.
Ahem.
This is more or less the gist of Zombie Apocalypse—you must survive! (As compared to sleeping through said apocalypse.) The game takes place over the course of 55 days—a pretty lengthy time to survive doomsday scenarios with flesh eaters running amok everywhere in typically wastelandish environments, but at least you can team up with buddies online. And for those fearing a repeat of a certain failed PS2 online experiment starring a bunch of average citizens, not to worry. ZA looks to be more coin-op than survival horror, meaning you’ll have flamethrowers and chainsaws in addition to your more standard military issue assault rifles and grenade launchers at your disposal, rather than, say, a push-broom that breaks after five attempted bludgeonings.
While you can play co-op online, ZA’s option to play a good old-fashioned multiplayer match sitting on the couch and joking with friends is a welcome addition, as it seems so rarely included in games anymore. No word on differences between characters (or what’s going on with the green radioactive goo everywhere), though you can rest assured that playing the loosed-tie, cream-colored shirt wearing black man will make you the most badass of the bunch. Konami also mentions that ZA will “test your dual analog stick shooting skills,” and weapon icons in screenshots also suggest there will be some dual wielding action.
In any case, Konami’s not skimping on the gore--check out the screen in the construction site area with the giant reflecting pool of blood in the lower right corner--which results from both the business end of your weapons and the ravaged environments around you. From the look of things, though, they might want to take a page from Dead Rising 2 and not give us 8,000 zombies wearing the same rags or construction worker get-ups.
Right now, the game most closely resembles Hunter: The Reckoning, but let’s hope Konami has higher aspirations. Additional details are sparse, but any game with chainsaw evisceration is a step in the right direction (can we get a zoom-in option, Konami?), and with the various multiplayer options and new modes upon completion it seems like ZA could make a big, gory splash when it hits Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network later this year.
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