Line ’em up, knock ’em down.
Zombies have been the hot topic for the past few years, and have invaded every form of media around, including video games. One of the most popular franchises of all time, Call of Duty, has a whole mode dedicated to hunting zombies in a horde mode type of DLC. Rebellion Developments has made a game that combines all the fun of hunting wave after wave of zombies with its popular sniping game, Sniper Elite and mashed it into one crazy game.
The premise of Zombie Army Trilogy (ZAT) is simple – go from point A to point B and kill everything in the way. This can be accomplished with a different variety of guns, explosives and stomps. The arsenal consists of the main weapon of a World War II era sniper rifle, with a secondary weapon that usually consists of a machine gun or a shotgun, and a pistol.
Zombies with chainsaws?!
Platforms: XB1, PS4, PC
MSRP: $49.99
Multiplayer: 1-4 co-op
The story of ZAT is lacking. It’s as if the game was made and the story was thrown in just to add something. In a last-ditch effort to win WWII, Hitler has unleased the zombie hell to try and turn the tides. The heroes of this story have a minor back story to them that is told when selecting them at the start of a game. And that is all.
I have never played a Sniper Elite game due to the game being mainly sniping, and the fact that I really suck at sniping. And when I heard that this game, at its core, is a Sniper Elite game, I was a bit nervous of the combat and how well sniping would work as the primary way to dispatch the walking dead. Surprisingly, it works fairly well. Things got a bit hairy if one slipped by my sights, because that one can turn in to a whole bunch. Then I’m forced to switch to the secondary weapon to hold them off. The one major thing I noticed about this game is that the animations feel…off. A good amount of the time, after shooting a zombie, there was no reaction for a second. This threw me off a bit as I was not sure if I hit it or not so I would normally waste extra rounds of ammo. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it does end up being a problem as ammo, while not exactly hard to come by, is still a bit scarce, especially when playing on a harder difficulty.
The main type of enemy is, of course, the zombie, with a few other types like skeletons thrown in to help keep the game fresh. But all of that really does not matter, as the gameplay is essentially horde mode with objectives thrown in. Usually these objectives being hold off waves of zombies and then move on to point B. The game does throw a lot of zombies and they can appear, at times, from thin air. This literally happened. A wave of zombies was taken care of and a new wave appeared from nowhere. This caused death. Luckily, the checkpoints are done pretty well and not a lot of progress was lost.
I had fun playing through the solo campaign, but the heart of this game lies in the co-op. I had a blast playing with three other friends who were way better at the sniping game than I was, but I had their back with my machine gun. I took off a few heads with that bad boy.
The ultimate evil.
If the campaign has been exhausted, a horde mode can be played, although this is the campaign minus the moving from point A to point B thing. I didn’t really care for this mode as it had ran its course with me and felt stale after playing through the same thing for a few hours.
Zombie Army Trilogy is a simple game that is a blast to play, at least online with friends. Outside of Evolve, this is the only other game I can think of that makes you play as a team to help complete sections of the game. And blowing a zombies head off from a long distance is just satisfying. The one thing I didn’t really care for was the way this game was set up. Horde mode with objectives tends to get boring after a couple of hours. But this also makes it a game that can be played at your own pace. Plus with three games that have five chapters each for only $50, the game is a steal.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
