Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Kieron Gillen on December 16th, 2009 at 9:01 pm.

It’s a zombie shooter. It’s a rhythm action game. It’s released in 2009. It’s zombie rhythm action game 2009! Well, Zombie Slaughter Tour 2009, which through silliness of concept alone demands a post. Now, if linking to something funny but not very good, I play gentle in the actual text. After all, someone will play the demo before considering throwing cash down on the full thing, so will realise a giggle all it’s worth. Alas, Latana don’t have a demo and only an option to buy the full thing. For a dollar, admittedly, but since it’s not even worth that unless you’re terribly drunk. I should stress it’s absolutely bloody awful. Here’s the video to watch though…

Why is it terrible? Well, for a rhythm action game, there’s no rhythm for a start. Which is a sort of lame stick to beat it with, I know. There’s just a disconnect between the actual rhythm-action and the violence. And I don’t just mean the normal sense of a quick-time-event being divorced from what you’re doing (An extended QTE is basically what this is, because there’s no actual musical structure you’re fitting into – just an atonal dirge which you create by succeeding). I mean that if there’s no zombies near you, your character doesn’t do anything. So you’re just playing matching-the-directions-on-the-cursors, and occasionally turning to shoot a zombie. The most mysterious thing is that you just seem to… well, die. As in, it’s not you holding off the zombies and getting torn apart. The screen fades to red. Apparently it’ll fade to read quicker if a zombie is near you, but dying when a zombie hasn’t even come within biting-range of your noggin’ is an epic conceptual fail.

I can only hope there’s some improvements before Zombie Slaughter Tour 2010.

(Which does beg the question – if you were to make a zombie-rhythm-action-game, how would you go about such a thing?)

Anyway, that was depressing. Let’s go off with a song! Go Zombina and the Skeletones!

L4D2ZOMBINACROSSOVERNOW!