Land of the Dead

Battling the zombie apocalypse, four zombies at a time

“Land of the Dead, Road to Fiddler’s Green” is a somewhat awkwardly named movie tie in game. The movie it’s based on, Romero’s “Land of the Dead” is a fairly generic, medium/average zombie movie. So it follows that the game is also pretty generic and average. I remember picking up the game box back in 2006 and seeing crowds of zombies on the back cover and thinking it might be scary fun to play through it.

Alas, this was not the case.

It’s not really all that complicated a reason why, either. It’s obvious the game is just a cash grab with the Romero brand tacked on, but what is truly puzzling to me are the things that they got right, packaged with the key critical gameplay flaw that exists for...pretty much no reason.

Let’s start with the story. It’s pretty simple.

The main character is Farmer Brown. This isn’t his actual name, but it’s what I’ve called him ever since I first read the premise on the back of the box and I will continue to do so as no one can stop me.

So after a hard day of work in the fields, Farmer Brown comes back to the house and discovers a stranger on his property. It’s time for Farmer Brown to grab his rifle and shoot him some trespassers!

Git off mah laaawn!

I kid, but that’s pretty much what happens in the beginning of the game. Oh, the stranger is a zombie and there are more of them attacking the farm and you have to run around getting ammo and bullets and weapons, but my interpretation of events in the beginning amuses me, so that’s what I usually go with.

Oh and you can introduce the zombies to Farmer Brown’s school of hard knocks. You can’t kill them with your fists, but you can power punch them straight into the ground, after which they slowly climb back to their feet all zombielike. Power punching zombies in the face amuses me almost to no end and I spent almost five minutes circle strafing that first group and engaging in fisticuffs with them until I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere and had to do something else.

After you survive the zombie ambush, Farmer Brown decides that his remote, isolated farmstead just isn’t safe anymore, so he heads for one of his neighbor’s remote, isolated farmsteads which he thinks is safe.

In order to get from your place to the neighbors, you have to travel through this big cornfield in the dark...while there are things making disturbing noises all around you.

This is legitimately the scariest section of the entire game.

I couldn’t see where the zombies were, but I knew they were in the cornfield with me and I ran like a scared rabbit, finally bursting out into the open and frantically jumping on top of the nearest hay bale, which I fervently hoped they wouldn’t be able to climb on top of.

Expecting a huge crowd of zombies behind me, I was confronted with...I think maybe five zombies?

Regardless, I dispatched them with a shovel I had picked up earlier and moved on.

So most of the game is travelling from place to place, trying to find somewhere that’s safe. Plotwise? Pretty standard stuff for the zombie genre.

Before I get into what exactly is wrong with the gameplay, I’d like to mention a few things.

Land of the Dead is actually pretty creepy. It’s a survival horror game in the old school sense. Slower paced buildup of tension, infrequent enemies which are pretty tough, not a whole lot of health or ammo lying around. Some zombies are eerily quiet, but if you listen closely, you can hear their slow, shuffling footsteps moving towards you.

The game is dark and moody and you mostly seem to travel at night or in overcast weather. Oh and in true Romero fashion, anything other than destroying the zombie’s brain will not stop them. You can chop off their arms and legs and they’ll still writhe toward you on the ground, trying to sink their rotting, undead teeth into your tasty human flesh.

Aim for the head, peeps. It’s just like in the movies here.

Actually that part is pretty cool. The market is glutted with zombie games and games with zombielike creatures (infected), but almost nowhere else have I seen a game steadfastly refuse to let you dispatch a zombie until you’ve destroyed its head in classic Romero fashion.

The atmosphere is pretty spot on. Things seem hopeless and you seem completely surrounded by the undead, reaching out for you with their cold, clammy fingers.

Unfortunately, this isn’t actually what’s going on here.

Remember what I said at the beginning of the review?  Battling the zombie apocalypse, four zombies at a time. Well...that’s pretty much the entire game here.

After a while I began to realize that there were rarely ever any more than four zombies on screen at once. I would kill them and move forward and then four more of them would attack me. Oh there were a couple of places where five zombies would be in a group together but....

This is just sad, is what it is.

When you watch the intro movie to the game, you see segments which I could not find anywhere actually in the game, where the player battles upwards of ten or *gasp* fifteen zombies at once! In order to do that while actually playing Land of the Dead, you would need to trigger the nearest four zombies to attack you and then run past them to the next group and trigger them. Okay, now you’ve got eight zombies following you. That’s pretty dangerous, but not quite fifteen. So if you kite them and keep going forward to the next group of four zombies, then you’ll have twelve zombies at once! Some of which that will actually be behind you as well as in front of you.

Oh noes!

But barring acting like an idiot or doing this intentionally, you will never see that many zombies coming at you in one large group at one time, which isn’t a game engine limitation, by the way. The engine can handle faaaaar more than fifteen zombies on screen at once. I’ll tell you how I know that later, though.

Oh and you will never be outflanked unless you enter rooms facing the way you came. The game never spawns zombies behind you to surprise you. They will always be in front of you, in small groups of ones and twos and threes and fours. The notable exceptions to this are when you are manning a chaingun, defending a fixed position against a large group of them, and when you are standing on a walkway and there’s a two or three medium sized groups standing about below you. At that point I had grenades and I made short work of them, so both of those instances don’t really count at all.

If you are fighting in an arena-like area, expect no more than four or very rarely five zombies at a time, because that is all the game devs thought the player could handle and expect them to come at you from the most predictable of locations.

Once I realize this, despite the tense, horror filled atmosphere, I quickly grew really really bored. And it just makes no sense, really. Moving the spawn points around so zombies come at me from behind would’ve been interesting at least, because the game is just one long, linear path from point A to point B. And actually fighting a large crowd of zombies in this game engine is more than a little exciting, but the Land of the Dead never provides this.

If you are careful with your headshots and don’t spray ammo all over the place, you’ll have plenty to finish the game with and destroy every zombie you ever come across...and his inevitable three friends in the same area.

It’s just so boring. I don’t know why the devs did it this way, when with a bit of tweaking you could have had a really challenging, really fun survival horror title. As it is, it’s pretty much pure drudgery after a while. Walk from place to place wiping out the same four zombies over and over and over again, culminating in Farmer Brown eventually reaching the ‘City of the Living’ and clearing out a penthouse on top of a building...four...zombies...at...a...time.

Roll credits.

*yawn*

Zzzzzzzzzz.

Wait, what’s that? There’s a fan made single player mod you say? Okay, I can give it a shot. Couldn’t possibly be more dull than this thing was.

The mod is called Dead Epidemic and it is...well....

You know how most zombie movies are B movies with no name actors that are cheesy and usually pretty awful? Yeah, this mod is like that. The zombie apocalypse has been caused by the nefarious Dr. Necro and you and your Special Forces team are sent in to an island to kill him, but he has his own human goons who shoot down your chopper and you are separated from your team and forced to face the zombies alone.

The voice acting is bad by the way. Like...really, really bad. And all of the dialogue is hamfisted and cheesy. Oh and there are more cutscenes in this mod then there are in the original game! Also, there are literally hundreds more zombies as well, making Dead Epidemic far more fun to play than the source material.

The mod has more guns and no melee weapons though, so you better get ready to shoot shoot shoot!

BOOM! Headshot.

Heh.

There are areas in the mod where you fight upwards of fifty or sixty zombies at a time! See? I knew the engine could handle that many. And you, the player, are much better armed than Farmer Brown, for the most part anyway, as you are a walking, talking Special Forces stereotype. No melee weapons for you though, but you get some pretty sweet guns. Makes things more interesting.

You fight whole crowds of zombies and get frequently outflanked by the undead hordes shuffling around you or spawning behind you to catch you by surprise.

It’s...it’s what Land of the Dead could have been, gameplay wise, and it is glorious.

For the most part, anyway. Fighting a giant horde of zombies in a pitch black forest while I was wandering around trying to find the way out was not fun and only my weakest gun had a flashlight attachment on it but I will say this. This mod actually makes you want to run away from the zombies, of which there are actual hordes of them, rather than a measly two or three or four or five, which barely qualifies them as a Sunday lunch group, let alone a horde.

Except for the very beginning of the original Land of the Dead, I never ran away from the zombies ever. Well, there was the part where the hospital was on fire, but that was more me getting out of a burning building than anything else.

Dead Epidemic forces you to move and watch your back. I was very jumpy while playing this as I never knew where to expect the next attack from.

Oh and you sometimes have to shoot it out with Dr. Necro’s goons as well, which startled the hell out of me. You don’t take many bullets before going down, by the way. The humans were far more dangerous enemies than the zombies, but they fit right in. You only get two types of enemies in the zombie apocalypse, ‘zombies’ and ‘assholes with guns.’ These fall into the latter group.

The mod is shorter than the original game, but it could’ve done with some actual playtesting, as there is one notable part where it is almost impossible to progress, as there is a microscopic area where a jump you need to do is possible, and the entire rest of the room where the jump is mysteriously not possible. I was trying to jump up and down in this one spot for like, twenty minutes and I almost quit playing.

You can dual wield certain guns, which is all kinds of fun, but as you go from one chapter to the next, your second gun will inexplicably disappear, or weirdly, you will have to shoot with the left hand gun as your original right hand gun will disappear. Odd and annoying, that.

By the end of the mod I had a veritable arsenal of guns and ammo, despite the high number of enemies, as the mod makers liberally gave me ammo dumps and health in the latter half of the mod.

Which is actually a good thing, because the end game fight with Dr. Necro himself was pretty hard. He runs around below you shooting an assault rifle up at you and periodically flips a switch which sends a lift full of about fifteen zombies up to your level, which you have to fight off while getting shot at.

Managed to beat him though and my character boated off into the sunset, ostensibly headed to non-zombie infested parts unknown.

Mission accomplished.

So there you have it. The mod is much more fun to play than the original, but the original has much better voice acting, cutscenes, and atmosphere. If only someone could mod the original and add like, three or four times the number of zombies, and change the spawn point locations. Would be a lot more fun, though you would probably have to add a bit more health and ammo spawns.

Too bad no one did that. We got this cheesy mod instead.

Oh well.