Luke Thewlis

Poorly engineered game which, though harder than the first instalment in the series, is a bland and frustrating addition to the series. When looking at the difficulty of the game, this doesn’t arise from the quality of the opponents faced but rather the lack of response from the game controls. Too often will you find yourself in a situation needing to interact with a vehicle or object only for the game to become unresponsive. Then there are the vehicles themselves. A military truck is somehow quieter than a small hatchback which the main characters seem unable to drive without revving the car to the redline before shifting gears. Then there is the utility of the vehicles. My character became stuck on another vehicle whilst driving a military truck and was unable to drive away despite the cars being nowhere near each other. As for the quality of the campaign, the missions are rather tedious and lack imagination. At one point early on in the ‘Heartlands’ expansion, the characters experience a raid from a hoarse of zombies led their by one of the neighbouring enclaves. Needless to say, once you have lost several members of your clan and have been reduced to the bare bones of your team, you would expect to be able to ostracise the enclave which caused so much damage. This is not the case and you end up going on more meaningless missions to support the tedious enclave. The game itself then becomes less of a survival game and more of a babysitting simulator for irritating NPCs. With regard to the zombies in the game, the difficulty is definitely reduced compared with SOD 1, with a single player being able to kill a Juggernaut or a Feral singlehandedly. Hoards of zombies which numbered at least 8 in the previous game now come in small groups, with a majority of hoards being no larger than 10 zombies. In terms of defending a base, these zombies now attack on a routine basis, mostly at night and the attacks can be easily anticipated. The problem with this is that you lose all of the unpredictability of the previous game. In short, I don’t understand why the developers of this game had to take such a mediocre approach to the game. I understand everyone wanted to see a change in game mechanics but I feel that the whole game has been ruined by the clunky and error prone character animations, the routine nature of combat scenarios and the tameness of the enemy characters within the game. *Spoilers* The problem with the gameplay starts when looking at the Heartlands DLC. For example, early on in the DLC you come to the aid of Ray Santos who is residing in the original valley with a group of survivors. One of the first interactions with Ray requires your new characters to chase away the Wilkerson brothers from Ray’s land. The ease with which this is done is nothing short of embarrassing in terms of the in game character development. As a further spoiler, Ray and hi enclave are the ones who drags hoarded of zombies to your base without warning. In short, stick to the first game in the series; that was at least fun, exciting and a change to the standard TPS game style.