ZOMBI

For once, on Halloween, I wanted to be on topic! At the start of the year, I select which games I might like to play across the following 12 months, and back at the start of 2025, I had two horror picks in my list; today’s game, and Resident Evil 4 on the Wii. I will try to cover the latter in November – however, for now, I have Ubisoft’s zombie game to get through. I can’t chicken out of this!

Uh oh, here comes the horde.

Ubisoft has many famous series, but also quite a few standalone games. Today’s title was first released as a Wii U launch title, with the title ZombiU, in November 2012; but then it was given a second life as a port made by Straight Right, retitled ZOMBI, and released on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on August 18th, 2015. Although… calling it a “second life” may be a little gauche; we are talking about survival in a zombie apocalypse here. This game is known for doing something never seen before – fresh, new ideas, those are rare nowadays, especially those that directly affect gameplay. Enough beating around the bush, let’s see what this is all about.

London has Fallen

Well, can't say it's a great living arrangement, but...
it's not like there are better options right now.

The zombie apocalypse is underway. Your survivor is surrounded by undead, but a voice from the metro PA tells them to run into the station. They race through and end up in a Safe House designed by their new friend, the Prepper, who will help them survive. Out of the goodness of his heart, sure, let’s go with that. Before the survivor can go on missions, they need to get a weapon – a cricket bat – and a Bug-Out Bag (BOB), with room for the survival tools they’ll gather. You also get a handgun, with limited ammunition (for survival horror, that’s par for the course). Finally, you get a Prepper Pad, which scans the area and detects anything of interest: Dead bodies, containers, doors, hidden items. Scanning doors with this can often allow the Prepper to hack them and open the way for your protagonist. Similarly, scanning security cameras can reveal the map in their areas.

Your first mission is to scan a grocery store’s CCTVs at Brick Lane Markets. After getting a key card, you gain access to London's sewer system, which serves as quick travel between areas. Be careful when you explore, though; your only save points are beds, and though you can find some aside from the one in the Safe House, those are few and far between.

Zombies, if you come back, you get the whack!

It's a law of survival against the undead; if you can sneak-
attack them, do it. They aren't smart, but they're numerous.

You move with WASD, aim (guns, throwables, and melee weapons) with the right-click button and shoot/attack/throw with the left-click, you can also press left-click alone to push an enemy away. You open the BOB with the tab key. Q is used in specific instances, like removing wooden barricades from doors. E is pressed to interact with scenery elements, crouching, jumping over, and looting bodies. R to reload the firearm, F to trigger the flashlight (and hold down the key to change the beam’s strength; higher beam means the battery empties faster, but it always recharges when turned off). V to quickly turn around, and C to activate the Prepper Pad and look for information and stuff to loot.

The Prepper Pad adds handy little dots so you can know what
to scan! Its only issue is that it detects rats and birds as well
as dead (or undead) bodies, so it can play slight tricks on you.

This quest is a decent introduction to the mechanics; you can set items in your BOB to keys 1 to 4, whether it be weapons, tools, or healing items (medpaks, food or drinks). Zombies will be attracted to the light of flares you throw, giving you a moment of safety; or you can throw Molotov cocktails at them. Or grenades. You’ll have options. And you better learn to use them fast, since you’ll face your first horde just before entering the grocery store. You can fight the zombies, or you can run inside. Zombies keep coming at you unless you completely obliterate their heads with blunt damage or bullets.

The grocery store horde may be your first encounter with this game’s unique mechanic. I know it was mine.

The Dead You Rises

Oops. Looks like I couldn't escape those.

If your survivor is killed by zombies, it means they get infected, right? How can you come back from that? Answer is, you don’t. Or rather, your dead character doesn’t. When the game cuts back to the Safe House, you are now another survivor, who somehow also found themselves in there. They have basic BOB inventory (just the cricket bat and a handgun) but possess all the key items so far (to avoid potential soft-locks).

I NEED THIS BACKPACK!
You aren't using it, you're dead!

What's next? Well, use the sewer system to return to the spot where your previous Player Character died, behead their walking corpse, and get your inventory back. It’s brilliant. I can see why it was hardly done before or since, as it does require a lot of specific game design to accommodate the mechanic. Not to mention that, as a result, you can’t grow too attached to your characters, especially during the first run. (Also, try not to die too fast the next time; as far as I can tell, if your current character dies before they could scavenge your previous one’s inventory, the previous one despawns and you lose that stuff.)

Once you got the grocery store's CCTV data (which, at the same time, reveals the map to you), it’s back to the Safe House, which you’ll have to protect from a zombie onslaught. And then, you get your next mission: Infiltrate Buckingham Palace’s bunkers. I’d expect that to be the final stage! I’ll take it. An uncomfortable trip through dirty sewer waters, followed by a walk through the chaos outside the Palace, and we’re in.

Visiting Buckingham? What am I, a goddamn tourist?
At this specific moment in time, too?

Well, at least this guy is safe in here, and he'll be as long
as he doesn't have to leave...

Deep in the bunker, our character finds a laboratory helmed by a scientist, Dr. Knight. He is working on a cure, but he will need a book hidden in the Palace. The Palace guards are still here; it’s just that they walk and grumble a lot now. And what’s the book about? Well, this outbreak was foretold in the writings of John Dee, a scientist who worked under Elizabeth… I, 400 years ago. This Black Prophecy was used by self-proclaimed “Ravens of Dee”, who worked with the royal family and the British Government to prepare mankind for the possible apocalypse. After you bring Dr. Knight the book and notes, he adds that he’ll need additional documents from an apartment building at Brick Markets Lane.

One room of Buckingham Palace is just on fire, for some
reason. Probably the only warmth we'll have all night.

Fight or Flight

Aaaand here goes the only party we'll be able to attend tonight.

While searching apartments for these papers, your survivor’s transmissions with the Prepper are interrupted by a woman named Sondra, who says there’s an escape route for survivors at the Tower of London. (Off-topic, but I found the moment in this mission where we walk through an entire dance floor of zombies hilarious; they can’t hear you due to the loud music, and are harmless if you don’t bump into them.) After bringing the documents to Dr. Knight, he learns about antibodies that can counter the disease – if you’re grabbed by a zombie and you have a syringe full of that stuff, you can inject it, which will “defeat” it, but you’ll have to reload the syringe in specific corpses that have the antibodies, detectable with the Pad.

Killing the zombies that are climbing the ladder is fun. Not
 so much when the roles are suddenly reversed.

Then, it's off to London Tower in hopes of escaping. The Prepper disapproves of your survivors trying to leave the area, but you can still use the Safe House. As a new quest, you can look for seven Letters of Dee, scattered across the explorable world and containing enough info together to let Dr. Knight create the Panacea, a true cure against zombification. Many letters are in later areas, so you must progress the plot to get them all.

I'm not quite sure what happened, but I think I fought some
sort of electromagnetic zombie in the nursery's basement.

The escape plan fails; before the helicopter can land by the Tower, ravens fly into its blades and crash it. Something supernatural, darker than we first thought, may be at play here. Upon returning to the Safe House, your survivor notices that its generator is running out of fuel, so the Prepper tells them to get some at a petrol station by Brick Lane. However,  the station’s owner, a man named Vikram, desperately needs antibiotics, and will only trade the petrol for them – thus follows a lengthy trip into a nearby nursery. Not that this helps much since, upon our return, Vikram is zombified and eating his own child (yikes), with just enough human intelligence left to beg to be killed.

Zombie stories are just one dramatic scene ending badly after another, aren’t they?

On the plus side, the arena has plenty of gas cans, so you
can blow up the "competition".

A new mission appears when get get a transmission from a girl that needs to be rescued, as she and her family are barricaded in St. George Church and trapped. Well, a zombie apocalypse brings out the best and the worst in people, so our survivor goes for the rescue only to end up in a trap set by a guy named Boris, a self-proclaimed “king of zombies”. The guy forces survivors to face zombies in sick gladiator-like matches; we fight for our life, and exit the game when Boris gets eaten by his own undead contestants. Cool, cool.

Apparently riot armor ain't too much of a protection
against zombification.

All the available areas have been seen, so we can collect the Letters and take them to Dr. Knight, who can then create the panacea, a vaccine. (Uh… guess it’s too late to use it on most of the population, then.) However, the guy had to get a flash drive elsewhere in the Palace and got bitten, so… yeah, we mercy-kill him, too. This lets us use his eye to open a retinal-scan door, get the drive, and run to leave with the Ravens of Dee. This pisses off the Prepper, who permanently blocks off the Safe House from the player. No option left but to escape before Royal Air Force bombers wipe London off the map to end the contagion. Play wise; there’s no coming back from the last mission. This death will be final, and the only “happy” ending is escaping alive and with the panacea.

Gripes

I haven’t spoken much about issues I may have had with gameplay; well, here they are. For the most part, I enjoyed my experience playing the game, were it not for several annoyances, some minor, some major.

Okay, the first and easiest: Call me a n00b, I’ll take it, I don’t play this type of game often. As a result, I was often careless with my firearms, so I did run out of ammo quite often. I mean, yeah – it’s survival horror, you make do with what you find. Fair. I didn't adapt well enough, I guess!

It's very easy to end up cornered and facing more enemies
than you (and your firearms) can handle.

The unique mechanic of survivors getting zombified lends itself to a lot of fun twists on classic gameplay, but it has its downsides. Sure, on the unlucky occasion that your previous character died, you do get a new one with the basic inventory and skills. Your survivor’s skills with firearms improve the more you use them – so, of course, if that survivor dies, it’s back to square one. However, since you’re back to basic inventory, with most of the stuff you previously gathered in your BOB missing, you must remap your hotkeys every single time, and especially when you retrieve that past inventory. (And, of course, you’ll have gathered more stuff on your way, so you might not be able to take everything.) And as I said – if you die again on your way to retrieving your stuff, that previous zombie goes away, along with their inventory.

Ironically, some of the longest-surviving characters during
my playthrough were those least suited for survival. Each
character has a name and a profession, as you can learn when
checking through their papers. This one, in the screenshot, is
a young babysitter. That info is given randomly and is just set
dressing, yet there is something kind of cool playing
"average joe" characters throughout.

This time, you better not crash, you better not- it crashed.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

The worst issue, though? A very common problem with this PC version is how often it crashes. It seems to always do that roughly an hour after I start playing, AND specifically when I'm heading back to the Safe House to save my progress. Yeah, that’s demoralizing after a while. After several sessions of this happening, I was still a little scared of the zombies, but my trust in the game itself was gone. The rest of it felt more like a fight against the program than a fight through its challenges. And before you ask, yes, I tried things like switching from fullscreen to windowed, since that worked for Balatro, which developed the same issue after a while; nope, the game still crashes specifically when I head back to the Safe House.

All the multiplayer options from the original Wii U version are missing. Finally, the game forces you to pass by Ubisoft’s proprietary platform, Ubisoft Connect, which does kinda suck if you don’t want to deal with yet one more gaming platform.

Final thoughts

The Virucide shot obtained after the Buckingham mission
doesn't come in handy too often; only when you're grabbed by
a zombie. And recharging it can be tricky, too.

If it weren’t for the crashing issue, I would enjoy this game a lot. It creates an excellent atmosphere and takes full advantage of its gimmick, integrating it in interesting ways to both story and gameplay. The plot has the hallmarks of modern zombie stories, with survivors scraping by, people looking for a way out of this Hell, and others using the situation to exert their sadism or nab power. Many tragic scenes are weaved through the narrative, all about the repercussions of a zombie apocalypse. You can’t be entirely certain of the motivations of some key players – is the Prepper really that good of a person by letting you use the Safe House, or is he using you for his own self-interests?

You will bemoan the lack of space in your first BOB.
The upgrades to it are hard to find, too.

As expected of a horror survival game, you never have enough  to feel entirely safe – you’ll find tiny quantities of bullets for your weapons, so you’ll always end up relying on your melee weapon. Single-use items like flares or explosives must be re-mapped to your hotkeys after use, so you’ll rarely use more than one against hordes. And, as you learn early during the grocery store mission, you never know when you’ll get yourself cornered by a surprise horde. Never mind the occasional jump scares from zombies you didn't see coming!

I'm still caught up on the dance floor zombies. Such a great,
hilarious out-of-place moment in a dreary, dark game.

The world can be fun to explore, as you’re kept on your toes – many areas are so dark that you can’t see anything without the flashlight. There’s a few beds away from the Safe House if you need them, the sewer system makes for easy and quick transport (WHEN IT DOESN’T CRASH!), and there are just enough secrets to encourage one to look everywhere, no matter how risky. The threat of zombification always hangs like a sword of Damocles – sure, you return as a new survivor, but then you have to get your stuff back, some of which is easy to lose forever. I can remember how angry I was that time I lost the nail bat, a great melee weapon. And, oh yeah – on the hardest difficulty, you have only one survivor. Good luck.

Some setpieces are... you could say, majestic.

Technical issues notwithstanding, I feel I could have loved it. I wasn’t so sure when starting, thinking I’d be too chicken, but no, it was good! My experience was tainted by the random crashes, however; almost made me quit, it was so infuriating. If it wasn’t for those, I am sure I would have loved the entire thing, even with its occasional warts.

ZOMBI is available on Steam for 19.99$ USD.