When a new First Person Shooter lands on Wii U, you got our attention. Sure we love our Wii U to play games such as Mario and Zelda but we can’t deny we’re missing out on the First Person Shooters aren’t we? From time to time, we see shooters popping up in the eShop, some are enjoyable while others aren’t worth your time or your money. Too bad this zombie shooter ‘Chasing Dead’ can be added to the list of disappointments.
Cliché story filled with cleavage
From the moment you start playing Chasing Dead, it’s already clear this isn’t a high-quality product. The story is strange and doesn’t make sense at all. You’re forced to take a trip to duplicate Earth (a second Earth we created in the future so it seems) to investigate a strange new virus. The humans on duplicate Earth transformed into zombies and the squadrons of scientists that were sent there before, were never heard of ever again. Needless to say, there’s something terribly wrong on duplicate Earth and it’s your job to find the solution and stop the virus from spreading. It’s something we’ve seen and played in a lot of other games.
The presentation of the story, on the other hand, is rather unique. The game uses real-life actors instead of computer generated ones. This makes the entire game feel like an old B-movie filled with damsels in distress and random cleavage behind every corner. The dialogues are filled with cheesy humor and off-topic chatter. We’re sure a lot of gamers will hate the way the presentation got handled but fans of classic B-movies will find some amusement in the cast of women.
A lot of technical issues
So the story and presentation are both questionable but that doesn’t mean the game is bad, right? Well, no, but we must admit that the game isn’t that fun to play. While standing still, the game looks great, including some nice flares and some beautiful 3D environments. Things go south the moment you start moving. I’m not going to explain the difference between 30 fps or 60 fps but if you know this game can’t even handle the 30 fps mark, you know you’re in for trouble.
The moment you start moving, the graphics won’t be able to catch up, resulting in screen tearing and random enemies that seem to appear out of nowhere. It’s a shame that the developers didn’t invest more time in their product since there truly is potential in the game but thanks to the technical issues, it’s almost impossible to find it. As if random appearances of zombies weren’t enough, the game isn’t very accurate either, hitting a zombie is harder than it should and this will result in a lot of unnecessary deaths.
What am I supposed to do?!
To make things even worse, the game never explains to you what you need to do. We enjoy our freedom in open-world games but a game like this better came with a small tutorial. During your very first steps in the game, you’ll learn by force that you’re able to interact with objects using your action button. Don’t know how to fire your gun? That’s too bad because there’s already a zombie standing right in front of you.
The first level plays on a crashed plane and lacks any kind of tutorial, when you’re finally able to pick up the gun and shoot down the zombies, you’ll have to face an incredibly strong boss without knowing how to tackle him. Having some challenge is fun but this is just ridiculous, the game doesn’t give any hints and it’s practically unplayable because of that.
The other levels share the same faith. We haven’t seen them all (because it’s not worth it) but every level could use some kind of tutorial or waypoint. Being stranded on a roof just to find your way down, can’t take fifteen minutes of your time, without waypoints, it sadly did. The levels look OK when it comes to design and when you’re standing still but due to the lack of waypoints, every level will let you end up with a lot of frustration.
| The good: | The bad: |
| + Looks good while standing still | – Technical issues |
| + Real actors | – No tutorial or waypoint |
| – Frustrating |
Chasing Dead isn’t the game we hoped for. A First Person Zombie Shooter sure sounded like fun but this game doesn’t offer any of that. The game looks great but when you start moving, everything fails. Zombies randomly appear, the frame rate drops below ten and due to the lack of waypoints, you never know where to go. Since the game costs 29.99, we can’t really recommend it to anyone. If you’re looking for a Zombie game on Wii U, there’s more than one better alternative for that price.
1 out of 5
