Stubbs the Zombie Review
Be the zombie, convert humans into zombie allies, take control of their vehicles, use your body as a weapon, possess your enemies, and destroy human civilisation one brain at a time.
Flash back to the late 1950's. Meet Andrew Monday, an orphan who became a billionaire playboy industrialist, and the creator of the futuristic city of Punchbowl, free of crime, poverty, and pollution. Now meet Stubbs, who awakens from his long deathly sleep to find a visionary's utopia full of big fat juicy brains.
Stubbs the Zombie has been built using the early Halo CE engine, so you'll see many similarities as you go on your killing spree. I found that a lot of elements felt very familiar (vehicle handling and weapons). You regenerate after being hurt in Halo fashion, and loading screens share Halo’s format. However, this is a third-person game with limited weapons and tactical abilities. It is mostly about what every zombie dreams about: chewing on cranium.
This game is loaded with cheesy one-liners from your victims, from "He's eating my brain!" to "Hey you, spit that out!". The music (treats from the 50's such as The Chordette’s "Lollipop" and "Mr Sandman") complement each other well in this total bloodfest of a game. The levels are well textured but simple in design – some of the larger areas feel a little empty. There are a handful of simple puzzles, nothing too challenging until you turn the difficulty up. Like Halo, there are four levels of difficulty - be aware that on normal I finished it in just over four hours. This is a very short game.
The in-game characters range from high school jocks weilding planks of wood to riot police, farming hicks with chainsaws to prom queens worried about breaking a nail. They are all going to die at the your hand (Stubbs) and the hands of your zombie minions. The sound effects are great, with lots of screams, begging, and crunching bone sounds followed by the inevitable "brains", murmured in true 80's horror style.
The game looks pretty good, some nice lighting effects, but nothing extraordinary. However, when it comes to gore and guts, Stubbs delivers. Loads of spatter, pools of blood, and corpses all over the shop. It doesn’t take long to amass a small zombie army. Some zombies have missing limbs, heads and you’ll even see the occasional crawling torso. A nice touch is that the zombies will either follow you around in a pack, or free roam on their own looking for "food".
