Nintendo must have thought the best way to grab the attention of the hardcore crowd was to release a zombie fps game. Honestly they weren’t wrong. While not a Nintendo game, seeing something so violent and gory running on a normally kid friendly Nintendo machine can catch a person off guard. The question remains, is ZombiU just for the people who buy a game off a shelf just because it has zombies? Or is this game actually interesting and full of good ideas that will change how we play FPS games forever? I had a chance to play with the game at E3 and here are my impressions.

Not as offensive as an African zombie.

While not much footage was shown at Nintendo’s press conference about ZombiU, besides a pre-rendered trailer, Ubisoft was showing it at their allotted show floor space. After waiting in line for two hours and watching numerous people, presumably investors from the looks of them, cut in front of me, I was led into a poorly lit room. In the room there were three Wii U systems (covered of course) displaying the game’s start screen with the option of multiplayer and singleplayer. The lady showing me the game put the game on singleplayer and walked me through how the game worked. For the most part I picked it up pretty quickly. The controls felt standard to an other FPS game and even though my two hands were farther spaced from each other, it didn’t seem any less conformable to handle the Wii U’s gamepad as opposed to a traditional controller.

One of the biggest problems I had with the game up front was the graphics. They weren’t completely bad, but they looked like a very early Xbox 360 game. In other words, they were primitive. This could be because the developers didn’t want to pay too much money on graphics or they haven’t figured out how to make full use of the console yet. I am hoping for the later because then they still have time to make the graphics stand out as much as the control scheme.

There are a few unique gameplay ideas in ZombiU. The first one would be the way a player deals with ammo and other items. On the bottom screen a player has access to an always open inventory menu. This comes in use when a player finds a corpse or a box to loot or needs to switch guns. The player’s character bends over to check the corpse if there is anything useful and utilizes a drag and drop loot management system. While in this state, the TV screen shows the player in the third person to let them know if it’s time to pack up shop when a zombie gets close. Juggling between dragging and dropping items and looking up at the screen can be stressful and adds a lot of the suspense a player would want from a survival game, but at the time I played the game, it had a “take all button”. It didn’t take me long to figure out that whenever I would find anything to loot, I would just tap that button as soon as possible to make sure I spent the least amount of time in the area as possible. This of course would be the wisest game play move, but it takes out all of the suspense out of looting. Hopefully this will be addressed and the button will be removed or maybe later on in the game a player won’t want to loot everything because bag space will be rare.

Another neat feature has nothing to do with the Wii U’s gamepad. When a player dies, their character dies permanently. They will spawn in as a new survivor who has to kill the zombified version of the old character if they want to get their stuff back. While playing I also saw players before me who had died earlier and were now zombies. I killed a Nintendo representative and received all of the items he had on him before he died. It seems like a very neat idea, but how far will Ubisoft take this concept? Will I be able to kill my online friends whenever they die in their game? Or will it only be available to people who die on the local machine? I asked the representative who was showing the game and she sadly didn’t have an answer for me.

It doesn’t feel as good as it looks.