Zombie Master

The mod community has produced some gems in its time. Portal started out as a mod, so did counter strike, team fortress and many many other games. I heard about a mod that pitted a team of players against a load of zombies – so far so left 4 dead – but in this one the zombies are all controlled by one player in an RTS type view. Welcome to Zombie Master.

Unfortunately Zombie Master is already at a disadvantage; because this is a co-op zombie shooter I have to compare it to left 4 dead, even if I don’t want to. I do have to keep in mind this is a mod though and provided for 100% free. Obviously ZM not going to be as polished or look as good as valves offering but as long as it plays ok – both as survivor in normal fps view and master of zombies in the RTS mode – all should be right with the world and I’ll have something new to play. First off lets look at playing as a ’survivor’.

When playing as a survivor (what you will do 90% of the time), you will immediately realise this is nothing like left 4 dead. Damn, I compared them already. It’s much slower and more restrictive in a wholly frustrating way. Your character moves slower, they shoot slower, they can’t jump as high, they reload slower, stuff blocks their way easier. It’s like you are constanly being opressed by some invisible force and end up struggling to just get from a to b even when there are no zombies. When you do get to be and start fighting the actual zombies it’s ok but never particualrly fun. Yes they are the usual shambling corpses but they are completely lacking in anything remotely interesting – even when it comes to the ’special’ zombies who boil down to just being stronger or faster, never bringing any interesting or unique mechanics to the fray. Struggling for something remotely positive to say at the minute I’ll mention the guns which look really nice and feel hefty. They are all specially made versions of the standard smg, shotgun, rifle and pistol we are used to in anti-zombie weaponry but do the job fine. On the bottom line survivor mode is simply a less than average fps experience that happens to be co-op. It feels like it should be fun, but never really is.

Moving on to the master mode and I have to be honest here, I’ve only played it once. It was sort of fun yet a bit counter intuitive. The controls to just navigate the map are fiddly to say the least (especially when dealing with indoor to outdoor or room to room transitions) and to spawn zombies you first have to click a spawn point then say what you want to spawn from there. Why not let me select what I want to spawn then have highlighted areas that I can click to spawn it from? Or even better, a little and very simple mini map with general areas I can click to spawn zombies from. Once you have managed getting some zombies on the map, controlling them is fairly simple except you still have to deal with the awkward navigation meaning anything other than select all and click survivor is just too difficult to manage. Basically – it doesn’t quite work.

Zombie master is very ambitious in what it has tried to do and very nearly pulls it off. Yes, it is a mod, and overall it’s relatively decent but constantly a few steps away from being good. The official website says it is no longer supported which is a real shame – with time and effort something fantastic could be made here. Team of people vs horde of human controlled zombs is always goint to be an interesting and appealing concept to me and I would think a lot of other people too; as long as it’s done well. I think the perfect thing that could happen now is have some talented modder (having Valve do it would be uber perfect) take the concept and mod Left 4 Dead to do the same thing (basically have a person take control of the director) – that would mean bringing some decent pace into the game and better zombie handling. Who wouldn’t want to play as the sadistic director in a match of l4d, and while I was expecting a less good version of this with Zombie Master, it was too much less good to be fun. Err…yeah.

If you want to give Zombie Master a go, you can grab it from the website in a measly 70mb download. I wasn’t bolwed over with it as you can tell but it’s a decent enough way to kill an hour and try something new. You never know, you might just love it and it could be a sign of something to come.

Related posts:

World of Grindcraft

It’s 18:05, and World of Warcraft has just started downloading itself. I keep getting into...

Chat Log…sort of

Arazmus: “I’m down! Just Go!” Waste_Manager: “Im coming! You are not dying now!” Some guy...

I’m a cleaner – Mission 1

Hitman: Blood Money is one of those games that never gets old. It’s brilliant and...