The Walking Zombie 2

Mostly PC, but console and mobile too
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Leisher
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The Walking Zombie 2

Post by Leisher »

A free FPS on Steam and Droid. Not sure if it's on iOS.

This game is shockingly ok despite clearly being low budget. Does it have flaws and bugs? Absolutely, but none are game killing. Does it have balance issues? Huge ones. But fuck...it's a perfect example of "Why the fuck didn't we think of this?"

This is an FPS set in a zombie apocalypse with heavy RPG elements. There is a long storyline and your character improves as you get XP. I was lvl 101 when I completed the story. Even at that high level I was nowhere near maxing out my character.

This game has a grind aspect familiar to casual gamers. However, it's not an insurmountable grind. You can see the mobile design elements like your vehicle needing gas to travel. Once you have no gas, you're not traveling. You can either buy unlimited gas or you can farm gas. More on that later, but as you can tell, that would get "grindy".

Your guy is different from everyone else thanks to the events of the prologue. Now 20 years later you find yourself tasked with helping out your community and that leads to helping the world.

Missions are given out by members of the four communities you'll visit. Also by Ace who happens to travel to each place you go.

Ace has three missions for each location and they come in easy, medium, and hard varieties. Some of Ace's missions are fun. Some become like a chore. I was always making sure to grab all three before I left to do missions as they represent a nice chunk of XP and cash. However, I also think they represent where some of my fatigue with the game came from. I'd do other things to entertain myself during those missions to give myself a challenge, like not using explosive barrels, not taking any damage, or not letting whatever I'm guarding take damage.

Missions given to you by everyone else are story line missions and they're done well enough. The overall story is cool, but pretty silly. There must be language barriers too because a couple of things just didn't compute. There's even choices to be made that will be reflected in the epilogue.

Game design is right out of the late 90s/early 2000s. You'll go through levels multiple times, but stuff does change. This honestly isn't that big of a deal because levels aren't all blank corridors. The biggest sin with this are the zombies that appear in your path that you already cleared, and worse, traps will sometimes do that.

Yes traps. That only you can activate and are more annoyance than danger.

Basic graphics, but they work. The game is just pretty enough for a blocky game world. If Supraland and Minecraft had a baby and it resembled Supraland more, it would be this game. :D

As you travel you also hit random events and these are pretty well done. Some are just a horde of zombies, others are puzzles.

As you level, you get skill points to apply to things like firearms, laser weapons, melee, lockpicking, and so on. Hint: most of those things you don't need. Lockpicking only worked on story line locks and those are rare. Melee is worthless. I never picked up a laser rifle. I've heard defense and health are useless, but I got them both to 100. Firearms I got to 186. I carried a single shot rifle and either a machine gun or a shotgun.

You also get perks every couple of levels and they're game changers. The ability to use your hands at a distance (important one), do more damage, take more damage, use less gas, and a huge list of others.

Some of the side tasks include: buying homes, upgrading your weapons, upgrading your vehicles, picking locks, fixing circuitry, firing stationary weapons, doing so from vehicles, solving weird puzzles (they're easy), and so on.

There's a place called Open World you access after your first town where you can harvest resources, particularly gas, but I didn't spend a ton of time there. I found it to be not as rewarding as it should be, and you can apparently build there, but I never saw that option.

What are the bugs or design mistakes? The lockpicking thing, no multi (although I think it's coming), the store system never really keeps up with your progress after the second town, I was rarely ever in danger, the best vehicle isn't found until you're basically done with the game, and some other stuff.

Oh, and there's loads of pop culture stuff, which is interesting as I think this game was made overseas?

I could genuinely go on and on about this thing, but this is one that you just have to play. It's dated, cheesy, flawed, but works as a solo game. It's not the end all be all, but it's a pretty ambitious game.
“Every record been destroyed or falsified, books rewritten, pictures repainted, statues, street building renamed, every date altered. The process is continuing day by day. History stops. Nothing exists except endless present in which the Party is right.”
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