ZombieU (WiiU) Impressions

From the outside ZombiU could look like just another shooter trying to cash in on the zombie craze. It is when you pick up the controller that you begin to realize that ZombiU is actually doing some new and fresh things to help it stand out from the horde.

ZombiU's single player is less about story and more about survival. The player must stay alive as long as possible through the zombie attack, and once the player is taken down, they will respond as a brand new character. The fun of this comes in the fact that as the new character you can reach the point that you're previous character was at to find out that they are not a zombie. I personally thought this was a great idea to keep the player retrying after every death.

My personal hands on time was with one of the multiplayer modes. The mode I got to try out pitted one player verse the other in a game of capture the flag. Instead of two players fighting against each other on the same screen though, one player (me) was given the pro controller and played on the big screen, while the other player (some random dude) used the WiiU tablet controller.

My goal was pretty simple...stay alive and capture as many flags as possible. I was satisfied with the controls of the game, only problem I ran into is how similar the pro controller is to the Xbox 360 controller, yet the right buttons A,B,X,Y was flipped with the right thumb stick. After some hours of play through I can't see this being much of an issue anymore. So how about the other guy? What was he up to at this time?

Well while I was running around scared out of my mind, the other player was setting up attacks on me with multiple zombies. The gamepad worked similar to an RTS style game, where the user would map out where they want zombies to be at, how to attack, etc... The gamepad player was also trying to capture flags as well, just using this unique style of gameplay.

Things just got serious.

As far as graphics and sound, both were at high quality. The game looked great, and the sound tried to capture great submersion.  The audio is something Ubisoft is really trying to make right, and you can tell this since one of the ZombiU stations could be played with some really nice headphones.

At the end of the day ZombiU will come down to how much content it has in the final game. The core elements of the game seem unique enough to catch a gamer's attention, but without enough content it could fall flat.

We will be finding out how well the final product does soon enough.

-Travis