I've grown pretty tired of Zombie-themed games over the years because I feel as though we have well and truly beaten that horse to death in all forms of entertainment. I'll still play them especially when I made a promise to play every single game that is in the PS-Plus catalog.
Overall, Zombi is a pretty solid game with a lot of familiar aspects associated with the gameplay. It is reasonably entertaining and has a pretty neat design scheme as well as a rather unique character system. However, it suffers from a rather major flaw that kind of ruins the entire experience.
Searching for a truly unique zombie-apocalypse game is a waste of time really. There are so many games out there that utilize this enemy method that I don't really even fault designers for being unable to come up with anything unusual and / or interesting. Everything has already been done before.
one thing that Zombi did well was to put you in a real life location which in this case is London. While I have never been there the areas that I did see in my 1-hour of playtime the areas I saw did seem quintessentially London and I appreciate this attention to detail.
You start out in a bunker of sorts and there is a guy on a radio that is trying to talk you through getting out of there. He give you tips on how to proceed and also serves as a tutorial of sorts. The way that they use the lighting in order to create tension is done very well, and there is more than one way to complete any area that you might find yourself in.
Placing you in abandoned and blood-covered offices, subway tunnels, neighborhoods, and grocery stores certainly helps to build the dread that we have all become so accustomed to in games of this nature and they do a good job of replicating the good parts of previous titles without trying to re-invent the wheel too much. There is a lot of material gathering that I am going to presume becomes a lot more relevant down the line and I did appreciate the fact that you can blaze through an area with bats a swingin' or you can opt to stealthily slip by if you so choose. I didn't really find an advantage to either method really but again, I only play for an hour and this might become more of a factor later on in the game.
Ammunition is scarce, as you would expect and are directly told by your guide in the earpiece, so avoiding firefights is something that becomes your norm really early on. The exploration, the maps, the graphics, the sound.... all of this is pretty great and I was actually very interested in continuing forward if if wasn't for one glaring problem with the overall game: The melee combat is terrible.
Melee combat isn't hard, it's just that it is the best option all too frequently and since this is going to be the case, it is extremely boring and repetitive. You start the game out with a cricket bat and honestly, this is the dispatching of choice unless you encounter one of those situations that there is a mounted machine gun somewhere for you to use. The AI on our zombi-fied counterparts is not very creative and honestly, it shouldn't be seeing as how it is a mindless zombie behind the wheel, but the way in which they all charge right at you as you wind up with your cricket bat becomes not-so-interesting very quickly.
It gets to the point where you are avoiding combat not because you are afraid that you are going to die, but because you really would prefer to not go through the boring sequence of events as you gradually collapse the skull of yet another slow-moving opponent.
Even though I was limiting my time to just one-hour by it being a self-imposed rule, I am sure that this aspect of the combat would have encouraged me to put the game away before completion anyway. I would imagine that they were trying to not make the game some sort of FPS game involving machine guns and wanted a more realistic "normal person in the apocalypse" type experience, but that being the case, they should have included more available melee weapons and different killing styles. The gore factor and the exploding heads doesn't really do it for you anymore after you have seen the sequence 25 times in a row and you have many many more instances to go once you make it to that point.
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you'll also acquire bats and nail topped bats but the melee process remains the same with any of them
One aspect I will definitely applaud is the fact that death doesn't result in some sort of time-warp to a place in time where you last saved but rather, it involves you taking over the body of another person in a rogue-like setup. The items that you stored with your last living character are still in the inventory, but all of the items that the person was carrying are still lying out in the field. This can be problematic if you don't have any additional melee weapons hanging around. The good news is that the cricket bat respawns endlessly so you always have that as an option.
Zombi is an interesting take on the zombie-themed games that exist out there and I like the use of lighting and real-world areas that you need to clear. However, the very poor melee battle system make this otherwise fun and easy enough to play game repetitive and kind of boring after just a short amount of time. Seeing as how there are already so many FPS games in the zombie category out there, I can't see any particularly good reason to choose this one.
