As you can see, Stan and I co-oped our way through Dead Nation, so now all of our faithful blog readers have to suffer through two separate posts about it. Or you could just skip this post entirely, whatever. The two games I picked up after the PSN Meltdown of 2011 were this and Infamous, and Stan had been hassling me to get this done, so we got through the entire game over the course of a few hours last night. Dead Nation's an isometric third person shooter where you try to survive a... sigh... zombie apocalypse. Are zombies insanely played out right now, or has it always been this way and I just never noticed? It seems like after Dawn of the Dead and Shawn of the Dead both came out in 2004 we've had a pretty steady stream of zombie media for nearly a decade. That's not to fault Dead Nation, which was actually a pretty good game, but I'm glad that nothing else in my backlog of video games seems to be zombie related, and my undead fix will come from passive tv watching of The Walking Dead. Anyway Dead Nation is pretty solid for a downloadable title that I got for free- the game plays just fine, looks good, was plenty of fun to play online co-op, the works. There's a well instituted upgrade system for weapons that it felt like we spent at least 1/3 of the game messing around with- you can buy all sorts of different weapons and respective upgrades at the many weapons stores, and money is plentiful so after each break in the action your gameplan will likely change at least a little bit. Armor was also upgradable, but unfortunately never seemed to produce any noticable effects and the upgrading system somehow managed to be confusing and overly simplistic at the same time. It's ok though, because that rarely mattered. Fighting hordes of zombies was actually more exciting from a third person perspective here than the similar Left 4 Dead titles' first person view; I think being able to see an actual huge crowd of zombies made for more fun than simply having a few of them crowd a first person view. The only real negatives I had with the game is that it never really got too creative outside of its fun upgrading system- a few zombies were much stronger and acted different from the rest but there was never any real boss fight to speak of; and while I don't think puzzles or platforming are necessary in a shooter, it would have been nice if some sections required a little more thought than "kill everything, then move on." Still though, I have to agree with Stan- it's a game I'd happily return to for a second go-around that I'll bet would improve quite a bit on a second play.
October 20, 2011
Dead Nation
As you can see, Stan and I co-oped our way through Dead Nation, so now all of our faithful blog readers have to suffer through two separate posts about it. Or you could just skip this post entirely, whatever. The two games I picked up after the PSN Meltdown of 2011 were this and Infamous, and Stan had been hassling me to get this done, so we got through the entire game over the course of a few hours last night. Dead Nation's an isometric third person shooter where you try to survive a... sigh... zombie apocalypse. Are zombies insanely played out right now, or has it always been this way and I just never noticed? It seems like after Dawn of the Dead and Shawn of the Dead both came out in 2004 we've had a pretty steady stream of zombie media for nearly a decade. That's not to fault Dead Nation, which was actually a pretty good game, but I'm glad that nothing else in my backlog of video games seems to be zombie related, and my undead fix will come from passive tv watching of The Walking Dead. Anyway Dead Nation is pretty solid for a downloadable title that I got for free- the game plays just fine, looks good, was plenty of fun to play online co-op, the works. There's a well instituted upgrade system for weapons that it felt like we spent at least 1/3 of the game messing around with- you can buy all sorts of different weapons and respective upgrades at the many weapons stores, and money is plentiful so after each break in the action your gameplan will likely change at least a little bit. Armor was also upgradable, but unfortunately never seemed to produce any noticable effects and the upgrading system somehow managed to be confusing and overly simplistic at the same time. It's ok though, because that rarely mattered. Fighting hordes of zombies was actually more exciting from a third person perspective here than the similar Left 4 Dead titles' first person view; I think being able to see an actual huge crowd of zombies made for more fun than simply having a few of them crowd a first person view. The only real negatives I had with the game is that it never really got too creative outside of its fun upgrading system- a few zombies were much stronger and acted different from the rest but there was never any real boss fight to speak of; and while I don't think puzzles or platforming are necessary in a shooter, it would have been nice if some sections required a little more thought than "kill everything, then move on." Still though, I have to agree with Stan- it's a game I'd happily return to for a second go-around that I'll bet would improve quite a bit on a second play.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment