Procedural Pooches: Death Road To Canada
Out today
Death Road To Canada [official site] is a procedurally generated zombie survival game. A little bit of Oregon Trail, a healthy measure of cutesy gore and a dash of the surreal to add that citrus bite. Yes, we've seen games like this before but we haven't seen one that looks quite this peculiar. And on the Death Road To Canada, you can teach a dog to drive a car. Dysentery be damned; this is the kind of feature 2016's survivalist demands.
I'm one of those people who flinches when things get a little bit too 'zany' or 'quirky', and Death Road To Canada is certainly teetering dangerously close to both of those descriptors. IT's on the right side for me though, at least on the evidence of that trailer. The flexing muscleman picking up a vehicle and preparing to lob it at the zombie horde? Perfect. The dog suddenly springing onto its hind legs and toting a shotgun? Marvelous.
Look at these extracts from the feature list:
Use the character creator to put yourself, friends, and family in the game. Have them show up at random to get eaten!
Throw chairs. Get your characters strong enough to throw large sofas.
Tell people to "Cool it."
Yeah, I want to tell people to "cool it" and then throw a large sofa at them. Not a medium sofa. A large sofa. Maybe I'm just in a good mood, it being a sunny Friday morning and all, but where I normally might see a game trying so hard to be funny and cute that it's honking its nose and riding a unicycle around the place like a clown school reject, Death Road To Canada seems fairly laidback. Packed with weirdness but not using the wacky (that's another one of those flinch-words) costume to disguise a lack of talent. The randomisation of party members and places looks effective and if a playthrough can be as consistently entertaining as that video, I'll be happy.
It came out today, for Mac, Windows and Linux, and I'm rushing to finish my work for the day so I can give it a shot.