Zombie Survivor X

Zombie Survivor X is a zombie apocalypse game centred around the traversal of various buildings, looting empty rooms, capturing rodents and killing zombies. If this sounds exciting to you, don't be so quick to jump in. Zombie Survivor X isn't a game without flaws, and these flaws mostly exist in the form of bad gameplay design and shallow story.



At first, you select a character that you customize yourself based on various attributes. Entering this game, I was excited because I thought I would get to play a realistic and gritty zombie simulator based on the thought of humans surviving an apocalypse against a tide of monsters they understand but can't overwhelm due to their sheer numbers.

The game has a very grey pallette, filled with modern tiles, fridges, kitchens, and rooms of a very similar structure. The rooms that you enter sometimes seem to have very little purpose other than providing you a selection of items for you to loot, and most of them are based on the same template. Many of the objects that you interact with in this world are just pasted in, things like lights and toilets being Ctrl+V'd into every room they are needed. This provides a platform for the developer to make a lot of filler levels, rather than traversal through a series of buildings which has meaning. The story nodes are very few, and the characters that you meet have very little believable motivation other than, "I was hiding here for a while and then you found me! Thank you!" and then, "Do you want to join?" with a "yes" reply and then you continue on to grind for the next 15 minutes.



That said, many of the zombie encounters are easily dodgable. They move at such slow speeds that you can maneuver around them deftly, which is probably why the developer chose to include random encounters *as well as* on-screen encounters, which for me is an absolute design no-no. If you're going to have encounters, choose which way you're going to have them. Either on-screen encounters or random encounters, but not both. That's just confusing and makes no sense.

The battles were fairly good, except most skills didn't really come in useful that often. The only upgrades you made in skill were often finding new weapons, and things like armour were just forgotten about because it was all about getting that next scalpel or gun that you think you would like your character to wield. There's nothing interesting about pressing the "Optimize" button on every single character and having them possess the most desirable layout straight away. There was no strategy in equipment, because there was very little armour or accessories of any kind to at least strategize who wears what.



The whole "gray and dark" feeling of the game was often broken by off-putting jokes and very playful banter that just felt out of place. Most of the game was uneven in tone, ranging from taking itself too seriously to not taking itself seriously enough. The gameplay was not deep enough to be satisfying, and the characters too thin to care about.

Overall, the game needed to find a better design for its gameplay and story to grip the player, or me for that matter. It just felt like zooming through a few rooms and grabbing a few stuff whilst killing a couple of zombies along the way. Where's the feeling of dread and doom, and where is the character development that we need to care about? Or if there's no story or characters to this game, where's the interesting gameplay mechanics regarding zombies and stealth that would make this game deeper rather than the traditional JRPG mechanics and not enough skills to make it interesting? The answer is, there are none, and that makes for not a very interesting game. Don't get me wrong, I admire this game's ambitions, but it just didn't cut it for me.



Overall Judgement
Presentation: 6/10 -- Polished and dreary, but the uneven tone and pacing led this astray somewhat. Still a nice experience though. No technical bumps.
Graphics: 7/10 -- Lots of custom material, nice atmosphere. Zombies look really like zombies, and the blood splatters are nice. Map designs are repeated over and over again, though. A sign of laziness.
Sound: 6/10 -- Neither great nor off-putting. Just average. I didn't even notice it.
Gameplay: 2/10 -- Leaves much to be desired. The gameplay mechanics aren't deep enough and it gets very boring very easy.
Lasting Appeal: 3/10 -- It's not very unique in terms that the story doesn't set it up to be unique, nor do the gameplay mechanics. It's just a very typical setup of a zombie apocalypse that never quite lifts off the ground.

Overall: 4.8/10 -- Bad to mediocre. A lot could have been improved. There is a good idea or two somewhere, but they're buried under so many bad ones and poor execution that I think only avid zombie fans should try this game. I enjoyed it, but only until a certain point until it started to become unengaging and repetitive.

Loser out.