The artwork for Undead’s Building by Double Drive out on the Nintendo Switch, looked confusing to me. The backdrop of a menacing looking zombie conflicts with the style of the title. I’m naturally drawn to such oddities, so I just had to give this one a test drive. I tried to make sense of what the purpose of this game is and can easily conclude I’m still as much confused as before.
Zombie outbreak
For reasons not explained by the game, there is a zombie outbreak. From the looks of it, the undead are just starting to roam the area because there are still a lot of people running around, trying to flee the mayhem. Your job is to operate the elevator of a multi-floored building to save as many people as possible. Why these buildings all lack stairs and have only one elevator, is beyond me.
No easing into it
The game starts with a simple message to save as many people as possible. You get to see security camera footage from all floors of a building. Some floors already have people waiting for the elevator to come up, while others show roaming zombies. Once you gain control you seem to be in charge of the elevator. Pressing up or down changes the floor and the buttons control the opening and closing of the door. You can check the cameras at any point to see on which floor people are in need of saving.
Operating the elevator in an as efficient as possible way, is key to saving people. If you wait too long to get to certain floors, the zombies will eventually get the upper hand and you’ll lose those survivors. Since the game offers no explaining, I found out that last part the hard way. The gameplay isn’t that difficult at all but a little bit of warning/explanation would’ve been welcomed.
A whopping half hour of gameplay
After all the survivors are saved or eaten by the undead, the game offers a summary of your performance. The chart presented, shows where there is still room to improve. The ultimate goal is to save everybody and getting a perfect score. Each new level adds more floors or a different layout to make it more challenging. Nevertheless, the gameplay is pretty dull throughout the game, despite the additions. After about a half hour I finished level 7 and concluded the game (with some perfect scores). Needless to say, this isn’t the most compelling and challenging of games available.
Graphics are just unforgivable
The atrocious graphics presented are unforgivable. They look PS2 era at best. Nothing you could think to get away with nowadays. The animations look twitchy and character models get reused many times throughout the levels. On the other hand, I do think Undead’s Building would have benefited from a different theme. Maybe a cutesy 2D theme like Plants vs. Zombies mixed with the same game concept would’ve worked better.
Conclusion
The game mechanics offer a nice concept, but the presentation lacks everything to make it something more than just a concept. Calling this a game is already really stretching it. I was actually glad the game ended so quick so I could be done with it.
