hen you think Zombie games, you think Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame – you know, the games that are meant to scare the crap out of you. Wideload Games is taking a completely different route with Stubbs The Zombie In Rebel Without A Pulse. Take the Halo engine and configure it to be first and third-person action style shooter chomp-em-up. Except you’re not killing zombies. You are Stubbs the Zombie and it’s your role in life to kick ass, eat brains, and have a hell of a good time doing it.
Stubbs the Zombie is based in a futuristic 1950’s city called Punchbowl. Everything has this old wartime grainy movie filtered look. But while characters are dressed in 50’s era clothes and there’s oldies music blaring from speakers, at the same time in Punchbowl there are robots and hovercars milling about. Regular labor, theft, crime, and all unpleasentries that plague normal cities are absent due to futuristic technologies that have been created by Scientist Andrew Monday.
Tossing Your Guts Makes For An Explosive Experience
The game begins showing a young teenage couple sitting on the ground, romantically about to share a hotdog. Everything is peaceful, yet before they take their first bite, out from the ground pops a grotesque hand that is more interested in the sausage than anything else. Stubbs is hungry, and while a hot dog is a good snack for zombies, brains are what suits their true hunger. This is when you first meet Guidebot, the robot that teaches you the ropes on how to get around Punchbowl, movement, attacking, and brain eating. Apparently robots don’t care that you’re going to eat every person you can get your hands on.
Since Stubbs the Zombie is built using the Halo engine, Stubbs controls much like a third-person Master Chief would. The left analog stick is for movement, right analog stick is for changing your view, right trigger and X are for melee attacks, and A jumps. When a human is stunned you have the ability to eat their brains by pressing Y. Certain humans you’ll encounter will be harder to stun, including police officers that have guns, helmets, bats, or fists that shock and stun you. Before you can eat these more difficult character’s brains, you’ll have to hit them a few times before they are stunned.
Outside of being a zombie’s delight, eating brains has a number of functions. Brains obviously refill your health meter (as does sitting idle for a while without getting attacked), but also fills a number of other meters that allow for Stubbs' more advanced attacks. The first attack is the fart bomb. By pressing B when the meter is full makes Stubbs squat down to pinch out a nasty fart. Farts stun the enemies in a general radius of Stubbs which allows for quick and easy brain feasts. When enemies are further away, you can throw your guts at them by pressing L, and then detonating your internals by pressing L for a second time. My personal favorite attack is bowling your head into a number of enemies, and detonating it by pressing the white button.
Most importantly however, by eating brains of humans you turn those humans into zombies as well. This acts as a sick chain reaction, as the more humans you dine on makes a larger zombie army that are just as hungry as Stubbs. Zombies more or less act like unintelligent Pikmin. They are attracted to other humans, but basically wander around aimlessly. By pressing Y as you’re looking at them, you can whistle for them to follow you, as well as grab individual zombies and push them in a specific direction. While I can understand that Wideload wanted to keep this simplistic, I actually wish that I had more control over my undead minions. In certain situations it would be nice to take a few zombies and have them attack one set of humans, and another attack a different group. But for the most part it works.
The one final ability Stubbs has is the ability to control other humans. By pressing the black button, Stubbs tears off his hand and throws it. From this point you are in control of the hand, and once near an enemy you can possess them by pressing Y. Stubbs is completely vulnerable at this point, so it’s important to place him in a safe area and keep an eye on Stubbs’s health gauge. As the hand you can walk on the ground, walls, and ceiling until you get to the person that you want to control. Possessing police officers gives you access to their weapons, so while your army of zombies chow down, you can also shoot at humans that are attacking them. Your possessed human does not have the ability to regenerate health, so one your meatbag is dead, he’s really dead.
The Hand Comes In Handy Quite A Bit
With Stubbs having all of these abilities, it really opens up the possibilities on how to approach the different levels. Just bum rushing a group of police officers will not always be the key to survival, since your zombies will be killed off quickly. While some situations may work with taking a lot of casualties, you may want to send your zombies out to attack, and then possess a police officer with a gun to give your zombies some assistance. It’s always good to preserve zombies when you can because you’re never guaranteed to be able to gain new members faster than you lose them.
Rolling with your Zombie homies and snacking on brains is all well and good, but Wideload breaks up the gameplay with some different elements. Apparently the Police Chief wants to literally dance on your grave so you have a Simon Says-type of dance challenge against him. Stubbs also has the ability to use specific vehicles. In the preview version of the game that we played, Stubbs could utilize a hovercraft type vehicle called the sod-o-mobile, which has a turret that blasts out a sludgelike material that quickly lays waste to anything that stands in Stubbs’ way. And if that doesn’t work, running people over always gets the job done.
Since the game uses a very stylish film technique over all the visuals, the presentation is unique. But overall, the graphics in Stubbs the Zombie are average at best. Character models are highly repetitive, and environments are very open and bland. Even when you get into buildings it’s very reminiscent of ripping around levels in Halo with a different skin over them. While the visuals are a tad on the disappointing side, the audio end of things more than makes up for it. The crazy phrases you’ll hear from humans as you chomp on their skulls will have you rolling. It sounds ridiculous to hear someone yell, “No, no, not my face!” or "I have a wife and children!" Just hearing your minions moan “braaaaaaaains” is classic in itself. Wideload has also enlisted such bands as Phantom Planet, The Flaming Lips, The Dandy Warhols, Cake, and Death Cab for Cutie to reprise oldie favorites. The soundtrack alone rocks, and fortunately will be available on the day the game releases (October 18th).
There is no multiplayer gameplay, but there is 2-player cooperative play. You never have the opportunity to play zombie versus human – both players will play as zombies. This most definitely causes some fun times with a buddy on the couch, since you’re both causing mayhem in the world of Punchbowl. Having one player distracting your main group of enemies while you come up from behind never gets old. Plus, with the ability to possess humans really opens up the possibilities on how to survive each level, especially since there are multiple difficulty settings, a la’ Halo.
It may sound odd that Stubbs The Zombie more or less plays like Halo with zombies, but that’s pretty much the case. From the ground up with the control scheme, menus, and even loading screens, it seem like Halo has been re-skinned zombie style. Taking in consideration that the main core team working on this game is comprised of only 12 people, I think its understandable. Having multiple ways of getting through difficult situations, vehicles, as well as a variety of different gameplay scenarios really helps mix things up from just running around and eating brains. But then again, there are few things in this world more fun that taking a bite out of someone’s skull. There may be a number of high profile, big budget titles hitting this October, but Stubbs The Zombie is a sleeper hit waiting to happen, and just in time for Halloween fun.