Story:
Uh...........Not really much of that here. Two weeks after the first infection every part of an unnamed town has been destroyed and you play either the biker, the vet, the office worker, or the college student. In the same order, the general public sees it as the tough guy, the old guy, the black guy, and the girl. They have 4 different campaigns that leads to a minimum of one getting rescued. This whole story revolves around the opening cutscene which is your ONLY piece of story you get. The rest is just run N gun fun and it plays quite nicely. They manage to show one of every special baddy(except the boomer but who wants to render something that grotesque) and they make the whole thing look pretty cool. The one thing that bugged me about this was the fact that the four people who did the cutscene were some of the most terrible actors I've ever seen. In the middle of a small zombie skirmish, the biker saves the vet shooting a shotgun one handed and saying “merry Christmas” afterwards was an incomprehensible amount of faked awesomeness that it bugs me down to my nerdy zombie apocalypse loving spine. I mean, most of the time I thought I wanted a mindless kill zombie jamboree but now that I have it, I miss having a story and I hate Louis.
Gameplay:
As far as the survivors go, it's pretty predictable. FPS with Pelee and grenades, molotovs, and health kits. You can only get a glock, an Uzi, an AK, a semi auto and auto shotgun, and a hunting rifle. Even though you'd expect a shotguns blazing take on the zombie apocalypse, I want a little variation in the mix. I want weapons like the ones I found in dead rising. I want to shoot something in the head with a nailgun or chuck pop cans and jewelry at some zombies in first person. There are two kinds of compressed tanks you can find that explode like grenades and kerosene tanks that light like molotovs. The grenades on the other hand, aren't quite grenades. They are the all fun easy to make pipe bombs(even though they explode like grenades). They have a little beeper on it that makes the zombies chase it because particular to this game, the zombies like sound more than flesh. This is never explained though. Apparently their brains go canine when they become zombified and all they wanna do is play fetch. The med kits are pretty basic because they just heal you. You also can find pain pills that allow you to extend your life span temporarily. I could see what happens though, some 12 year old going “Mommy! Mommy! Grandpa takes those pills to make him live longer right?” “What? Where'd you learn that bobby?” “left 4 dead mommy!” “HUH! That game I bought you for Christmas that I was severely warned was bad for children but I blatantly ignored. LAWSUIT!!!”. Yeah.
Enemies:
These zombies are special. You even get to play them in Versus mode. There's the hunter who pounces on his enemies and tears their torso out. These guys are very suspicious though. The kinda look like a Mexicans wearing hoodies and I swear that a couple of them tried to nab my wallet. Then there's the smoker which uses it's abnormally long tongue to snare the survivors and then proceed to drag them away from the group and tear at them. Again I see that this is a message being implied. I see that smoker grabbing the hot college co-ed and dragging her to him, tearing the clothes off her body. Next we have the boomer which I find the most offensive of the bunch. He looks like geek who did the antacids and water south park trick and is busting at the seems with a nasty liquid that attracts zombies. So this guy want to sit on you right? Nope. He vomits on you and I don't mean drunken frat boy vomit, I mean this fat bastard's like a fire hose. He can manage to get everybody and their dogs in one burst. After he's done, he'll waltz right up to you and explode his nastiness all over you yet again. I take this as offensive because it's like saying all fat guys are nasty and smell bad. Then there's the one you can't control, the witch. She's a little lady who sits in the corner and cries. Usually though she'll be right in the way you're trying to go and she'll normally cause nothing but problems. If you make noise, get close to her, or even shine your light on her she'll get up, claw you to death, and run away screaming. This would seem like a problem but they made killing her in one hit an achievement on the xbox 360. That made everyone go “hey! We can kill her in one hit! She's not dangerous!”. This is achieved by sneaking up behind her and shooting her in the face.................with a shotgun. I've analyzed this and realized, this is Valve's message against disturbing hobos. Now last but definitely not least is the tank. It's a giant hulk looking thing(I say hulk because he's got a huge upper body but small legs and nothing but a pair of cargo sorts covering his radiated wang) and he can hit you..................10 feet across the room. He can also tear the floor from below you and chuck it at you and he is easily the most dangerous zombie in the mix. Best thing of all, you can play all of these cretins and like me you'll hate to find out, it's more fun to kill the survivors then to survive.
Campaigns:
There are 4 campaigns that you can play. No Mercy, Death Toll, Dead Air, and Blood Harvest. No Mercy is where the cutscene in the beginning leaves off. You get from a rooftop to the sewers to No Mercy Hospital where you race to the roof and use the radio for evac from a news helicopter. Death Toll has you go through a bunch of tunnels and more sewers before you reach a beach house and stall for evac from a boat. Dead Air has you fight through a lot of town area before reaching the airport and getting evac from a 747. Finally, Blood Harvest has you fighting through the woods and farmhouses following train tracks till you reach the final farmhouse where you wait for evac from a..........Well I don't know what it is. If you had a child hatched from a Panzer, a Warthog, and A porcupine, you'd probably have this vehicle. Each campaign is roughly the same length and each one follows the same set of rules. Start to safehouse, safehouse to safehouse X3, Safehouse to final standoff and evacuation. You always end up in some kinda house or shelter where there's an abundance of ammo, med kits, and usually some explodables which makes even the difficult levels rather bearable.
Final Judgement or Apocolypse Now: 8.0 out of 10
Each campaign will last you about 10 run throughs before you get bored and seeing that each one will last about 30 minutes you can expect 20 hours of rather repetitive gameplay. If you can get really into the versus mode then you can hope for an additional 10 hours and after that there's not much to offer. This would seem like a good buy but I rented it and got all I could out of it after around 2 weeks. This is decent to pick up and play when you feel like destroying legions of zombies but there's so little substance that you can't get the complete survival horror feel as you should expect. I really got into this until I realized that there was no more experience to gain and that the cries of people over XBL when I start tearing their organs out just became unfortunately unsatisfying after doing it so many times. My hopes for this is that they go all Resi Outbreak on it and do the same game with different characters, more weapons and accessories, new versions of zombies, and maybe even a story(Though this being a primarily multiplayer game we can't get our hopes up). That way we don't fix any broken, we just polish and improve.
