It is rare, but sometimes you see a game that proves, within minutes, that it’s not something you would seriously recommend to anyone. Maybe it has a great idea at the core, but the product that was crafted around that idea clearly does not live up to it. National Zombie Park, developed by Paper Games, is exactly that: a roguelike zombie survival game that falls short because it looks and plays so poorly that you’d almost think it is in pre-alpha.
Upon booting the game you will be in an empty meadow while a few weapons and other items rain down on you from the sky. Seconds later some grass will suddenly appear and a few moments after that you will finally have trees, bushes and buildings to enjoy. The game doesn’t waste time with explanations or tutorials; all you know is that you’re a guy in the wilderness and there are zombies roaming around.
While there are many things to complain about, I think the visuals are a nice place start because it’s the first issue you are likely to notice. The game is shown from a top-down perspective and there is just so much green thrown at you; bushes, grass and the canopies of trees all come together to form a giant green block on your screen that is unappealing to look at. As I moved around, the stuttering and blurry motion this created was almost nauseating and I found myself unable to focus on anything while running through the forested areas. The animations used for the player character are also horrible, making it frequently look like he is gliding instead of walking. Sometimes the arms move a bit when you attack or reload, but besides that he is as stiff as the zombies should be.
The game procedurally generates the areas you visit, a system that has been popular in indie games for a while now, yet the algorithm used for this title is horrible. Not only is it difficult to appreciate the variety in a forest, as moving some trees around is not going to impress anyone, there are also only a few different houses to find and a lot of the underground areas you can visit will spawn you in an empty room with no exits. For some annoying reason, the system will also nearly always spawn a fence around any random house, forcing you to make tedious detours. I have even seen instances of fences being placed through other houses because of how much space they take up.
If the lack of animation and the ugly visuals don’t scare you off, then you are ready to experience the thrilling gameplay. National Zombie Park prides itself on its realism, so you will have to scavenge for resources to keep your flashlight lit and guns loaded, but the spawn rate for these items is absurd, so I was never left without. Another feature is that the noise of firearms will attract other nearby zombies and this works rather well, though I would argue using guns outside is useless anyway, as melee weapons are stronger against individual zombies. Besides managing resources and the noise you make, the final big “realistic” thing is that zombies will instant-kill you most of the time, but their AI is hilariously easy to abuse, so most of my deaths were because of special zombies, the game’s frequent freezes, or glitches like being hit through a wall. Not very realistic, if you ask me.
The game also controls weirdly, which is most notable when trying to aim. The character will always aim at the location of your mouse cursor, but this twin-stick shooter approach generally works better with a gamepad, which is not supported. In the heat of action it can be difficult to keep track of where your mouse cursor is and, since the distance between the character and the cursor also impacts the speed at which you turn, this could make the game respond unpredictably. The only time I would use guns instead of the more reliable melee weapons was whenever a special zombie popped up or I was facing a horde, but even then the lack of animations made it difficult to figure out if I was hitting my target or not. Combined with the zombies’ ability to kill you with a single swipe, this could make the game frustrating to play.
The only aspect of the game that was done pretty well was the ticking-clock element of your health. I assume the character has already being infected with the zombie virus, since a meter at the top-right corner will gradually go up and you have to periodically solve this by taking an antidote. Unlike the batteries for your realistic flashlight, these are tricky to find and more frequently found on zombies than in buildings, which gave me an incentive to seek out danger.
While that is nice, anything good I have to say about the game is instantly overshadowed by what a technical mess it is. As you can see in the screenshots, the game is not particularly good-looking and I mentioned before that the animations are barely noticeable, so why, I ask, does this game run so poorly. I encountered many moments during which the framerate slowed down or froze entirely, often teleporting me somewhere else the moment it restored. Even the menu runs slowly, so I tried messing with the settings, only to find that there are none; there are three presets and a page that shows the controls, which can’t even be remapped. Add to that a variety of glitches, the most annoying of all broke the randomizing and I have since spawned in exactly the same situation every time, and you have a game that isn’t unplayable per say, but vastly worse than anything else you can get for the same money.
(2 / 10)
Bad
(2 / 10)
