Zombi – The Fridge Reviews

Developer: Straight Right
Publisher: Ubisoft
RRP: £16.99 (Steam) and
£16.99 (Uplay/Ubisoft Store) £15.99 (Humblebundle)
Released: 18th August 2015
Available on: Steam, Uplay/Ubisoft Store and Humblebundle
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard

The year is 2011 and London’s streets are full of midday traffic, people going about their business, going to work, on the phone, site seeing… they don’t realise what is soon to come. Fast forward one year. The streets are packed once again, but these dead eyes aren’t looking at the sites, they’re after their next meal. Survivors do what they can as, once again London is brought to its knees by a plague.

Zombi is a first person survival adventure game that is a port of a launch title game for the Wii U called ZombiU which is now available on many platforms. When it comes to the PC version this game keeps to a theme that appears a lot
within this title, that of additional steps that are superfluous.

What do I mean by that? Well you’ll see later in the review. In this particular instance its the need for the Uplay client to be installed even if the game is purchased and run through Steam.

You take on the role of a survivor, the name, sex, ethnicity etc of which you have no control over. I should add that that’s not me having a dig, just a statement of fact.

There are two play modes within the campaign, ‘normal ‘and ‘survival’. In the normal mode if your survivor dies you can continue to play with a new survivor (more on that later). This mode also allows you to select between two difficulties, standard and chicken, guess what chicken is. The survival mode is different in two ways, firstly there is no difficulty selection but secondly, and more importantly, if your survivor dies, that’s it, game over.

You can level up skills by killing zombies using particular types of firearm. The higher your level the faster you can reload and draw that particular type of weapon. It also increases your overall accuracy with that class of firearm. These skills are bound to that specific survivor though and should that survivor die all those skills are lost.

At the start of the game you are given a brief chase scene that really sets the tone of the game. You aren’t a super human and these zombies can be a very serious threat to you if not handled carefully. After all that you find yourself in a safe-house created by the mysterious ‘Prepper’, he’ll be a pretty constant companion for much of the game and will act as a tutorial for some of the more advanced game mechanics. The safe-house acts as a hub from which you access missions and can easily perform upgrades and store excess items. There are other, much smaller safe-houses to be found in the world but they aren’t anywhere near as well equipped as the main one. All safe-houses have two things, one is a bed and the other is a workbench. Sleeping in a bed saves your game and will allow you to continue from there even if your current survivor dies (as a new one of course). Workbenches are where you apply the upgrades that you have find hidden in the locations you visit to your firearms.

As I mentioned earlier, if your survivor dies you get a new one to play as, at least you do in standard mode. This new survivor will start with basic supplies and their skills will be at the lowest possible level. However, your dead body will now be a zombie and if you kill it you can loot it for all the gear you lost.

Holding [C] brings up a scanner that allows you to see if an item, or zombie, is worth looting. It also flags locked doors etc that you come across and adds them to your mini-map. Like the torch using the scanner also uses up batteries although at a faster rate. The power in the batteries regenerates over time, so there’s no hunting for spares.

You can tell its a console port from the controls. For example, rather than having a separate button for crouching you have to press [E] which is listed as the ‘Primary Interaction’ button. I’m sure on the limited button layout that a console control has that this makes sense but for a PC user using a keyboard and mouse this makes no goddamn sense and is quite counter intuitive. What makes this more frustrating is that while remapping the controls is possible there is still no way to make a separate crouch or use button, it’ll just remap the ‘Primary Interaction’.

Controls crop up again when it comes to combat. In most games you would just click the [Left Mouse Button] to attack, in Zombi doing so just performs a push to knock enemies back. In Zombi its slightly more complicated to attack because they added a step, that to be honest feels unnecessary. First you have to press and hold the [Right Mouse Button] to prepare the attack then press the left to strike. I consider this extra step unneeded because they could have just made pressing and holding the [Left Mouse Button] preparing the attack and then releasing it to enact the action. Tapping the [Left Mouse Button] could still have been a pushing action then.

Sadly there is a lot that is wrong when it comes to the controls making it feel like a somewhat lazy port. Which is a real shame because behind these somewhat daft controls lies a decent game.

I also can’t skip over the fact that there are no graphical options within the options menu besides choosing your resolution and whether vsync is on or not. This means anyone with a lower end PC may find this game just won’t run
well and theirs nothing that can be done.

You can be attacked while you’re messing around in your inventory, reading etc. The games world doesn’t pause just for you which adds to the tension of the game overall.

The inventory system is pretty annoying and somewhat inconsistent. For a start, you can’t use an item directly from a container. It first has to be put into your backpack (read inventory), then you have to exit the looting system and enter your inventory to use it. Once again the game has had extra steps added that really don’t need to be there. Also, for some reason the game will occasionally decide that the mouse can only be used with a specific container or item. Otherwise you have to use [W,A,S,D] to navigate which is both cumbersome and time consuming.

You may have guessed from the games title this game contains zombies. Usually these are of the standard shuffler variety (albeit these move a little faster than that) but some zombies have special abilities, these have some pretty obvious visual clues though so you can plan accordingly when you see one.

As much as I’ve ragged on this game and its controls once you get past them, which took some doing for me, its a pretty fun experience. I felt genuine fear when I saw a horde of zombies heading my way and felt a real sense of accomplishment when I managed to defeat them all with some tactical thinking (bottlenecks for the win). I won’t lie even on the easy setting this game is still pretty punishing.