October Magazine

REVIEW
ZOMBI
In the world of Zombi, there exists
a 400 year old Black Prophecy.
Astronomer John Dee predicted
that the apocalypse would strike in
2012 should the Ravens ever leave
the Tower of London. In response
appeared a secret society known
as the Ravens of Dee, dedicating
themselves to diverting this grisly
end for humankind. Imagine the
surprise when we flash forward to
2012 London, the city shattered by
this very same apocalypse. As one
of the few survivors still alive, oblivious
to all this soothsaying, the player
is led to the safe house of an exsoldier
known as the Prepper and
instructed on how to survive.
(Yes, he’s called the Prepper. He
gives you a set of supplies called a
bug-out bag. It’s just…don’t worry
about it. I snickered at these names,
too.)
Once you’ve established yourself
at Prepper’s base, it’s time to strike
out bravely into the infested streets
of London. Your current survivor
must rummage through the usual
array of wrecked shops and army
checkpoints, gathering the weapons
and supplies needed to protect
yourself against the zombie horde.
With ammo incredibly scarce – London
has clearly fallen quite some
time ago – the player must usually
resort to melee combat, fighting
off the living dead with your trusty
cricket bat firmly in hand.
Which brings us to the zombies
themselves. For a city as densely
packed as London (5,490 people
per square kilometre, says Wikipedia),
the shambling dead are very
light on the ground. Zombi takes
the route of each infected being a
genuine threat on their own. Able to
sense light and noise, they charge
at you with unnerving speed, each
strike taking a fair chunk out of your
health. The various types are all
here – your spitters, your screamers,
your armoured ex-soldiers –
and even the most basic of the lot
will take several smacks about the
head to put down. With any group
larger than three constituting a serious
problem, the player must move
carefully forward, checking every
corner, sparingly using their gun
and flashlight so as not to alert even
more of the dead. Just like Prepper
would have wanted.
This careful, dangerous approach
to the living dead might make for
a tense experience if not for the
fact that the combat is so utterly
dull. Though your choice of weapons
does open up later on, for the
most part it’ll just be you and ol’
Batty trudging backwards, swinging
away to conserve your extremely
limited ammo. There are molotovs,
grenades, various guns and even
a virucide injection, but the sheer
scarcity of them means that you’ll
never want to waste what you’ve
got. In this way, a lot of the fearful
moments that could be there are
instead just frustrated swinging at
zombies that just won’t go down.
Thrashing about wildly in a pitchblack
subway station does not horror
make.
What it comes down to, simply put,
is that there’s not much reason to
care. Every survivor is completely
interchangeable, a new skin
slapped on the old model. Everyone
you meet and everywhere you
go hits the same zombie-horror
plot beats we’ve seen for decades.
With the grizzled Prepper grumbling
backstory in your ear, you meet the
doctor working on the cure, the secret
society who knows more than
they’re letting on, the group of survivors
turned savage and bloodthirsty.
People get turned with such
predictable regularity that you could
set your watch to it. Backdrops like
Buckingham Palace and shoddy
council flats add some variety, but it
takes just one glance at your minimap
to remind you that you’re still
very much set on rails.
That said, there is one thing you’ll
care about: your stuff. The twist of
Zombi is that any time your survivor
falls to the slavering jaws of the
horde, control is switched to a different
survivor back at base. Presumably
this person also went through
all Prepper’s training and got caught
up on the relevant plot details, because
nobody so much as bats an