Entertainment

Land of the Dead: the demo

If you've never visited the site before, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or create an email subscription using the link at the top. Enjoy the site, and thanks for visiting!

I downloaded the "Land of the Dead: The Road to Fiddler's Green" demo last night. For those that don't know, this is the computer game tie-in to Romero's movie.

Sadly, it's not very good. It uses an old version of the Unreal engine, and while it doesn't look terrible, it's dated by today's standards (Doom3, Half Life 2, FEAR). I could overlook that though, as long as it played well, and it doesn't.

For a start, the zombies, even basic zombies, are seriously tough hombres. It was taking three or four shotgun blasts to the head to floor them. Now, anyone who knows anything about zombies should know that when you shoot a zombie in the head, they die. Next, even in the early moments of the demo, you get vomiting zombies, that try to spew some sort of unpleasant gubbins on you. These are even more armored than their less vomity brethren, and take many more shots to kill. So, we're already so far away from the traditional idea of zombies that this isn't much of a tie in. Another example of this is one of the loading screens contains something along the lines of "zombies will eat human flesh if they can get their hands on it, but they much prefer brains". WTF? Romero's zombies do not eat brains.

I've still got my hopes set on Dead Rising capturing the feel of Romero's movies best; I'm surprised he's not suing Capcom actually.

I did like the way the zombies munch on you after they've killed you though, that's a nice though I also liked the golf club/spade/hammer melee action (even if it did take eight to ten hits with the golf club to down a zombie).

All in all, the demo is probably worth a download (unless you have to pay per megabyte or something). I won't be buying it though.

© 2005 Is there food?.