Gameplay
So you’ve got 72hrs to find out what the hell is going on in this town, while trying to stay alive from the advancing zombie hoardes.
Luckily for Frank, he’s in a mall teaming with stuff he can utilise. Almost anything in this game can be picked up and used as a weapon to fight the zombies with. There are food shops dotted around the malls which you can hunt for food, which in turn refreshes your health.
Frank can level up in many ways in this game. In doing so Frank gains more abilities which will greatly assist him. Levelling up is done by collecting Prestige Points (PP). Prestige Points are earned in game by:
- Taking interesting photographs (e.g zombies about to feast on a survivor)
- Killing Zombies
- Escorting and rescuing survivors
- Completing Case Files
- Defeating Psycho’s
As mentioned, PP not only levels up your character but his abilities too. Each level grants you more health, and new attacks as well as expanding Frank’s inventory so he can hold more items. Frank’s hand to hand attacks are lethal at higher levels, he can pick up zombies and throw them right into other groups of zombies, his zombie face smash move is sheer bloody quality and his disembowel move which involves ripping out the guts of a zombie, happens to be one my favourite. I ended up using his hand attacks more then weapons at Lv50 because I rarely died.
The mall is huge, at first it does look rather small upon looking at the included map which comes with the game. The mall consists of many underground levels below the actually mall itself, as well as a car park and an outdoor area. There are weapons and food scattered all over the place and finding and utilising various weapons is what you must master in order to stay alive.
Since you do have a mall at your disposal, you’re free to travel wherever you wish to source out the best weapons, food items and other miscellaneous items as you wish. This is one of the most enjoyable things about this game, you’ll occasionally stumble into psycho’s who are essentially just that, they’re in game bosses who yield a huge amount of PP after they’re defeated, occasionally drop some awesome weapons, and also hold a few survivors as hostages. Psychos require some tactics to defeat but generally for the most part their AI is their weakness. If you can trap them behind certain object then you’re free to fire away at them, if you have a firearms that is and obtaining firearms from a certain store in the game is a headache and a half for the beginner…
Zombies in the game are brilliantly recreated from what we’ve seen in the movies. The way they shuffle towards you, their animations are just superb and Capcom have once again proven that they are masters of the Undead Horror genre. Depending on the weapons you use to dispatch them with, their death animations can be quite hilarious.
The sheer variety of things to discover in this game will keep most gamers playing for hours upon end. Bored of dispatching zombies with a baseball bat? Fine! Grab a frying pan and smack them in the face with it. Bored with that? Heat up said frying pan over a stove and burn their faces off! Bored still? Pick up a wooden bench and take out a group of the evil buggers!
The game is exceptionally fun to play because there’s an endless amount of weapons at your disposal. Want some humour? Just grab a skateboard and skate through the mall sending zombies flying in either direction! If you’re bored you can pick up various toy heads in toy stores and place them onto the heads of the zombies themselves – it’s hilarious watching a group of 10 zombies bumbling around with traffic cones over their heads.