Tickle Your Brain
I have a friend who is rabid about Zombies and Zombism. Truth be told,
he’s a very good friend – the best man at my wedding. And
this best man believes that wherever he lives should be essentially zombie
proof. He has a Survival Guide of all things. So when something like Urban
Undead comes along you can understand that he would devote considerable
time and energy to this cause. You can understand that only, of course,
if there was pity in your heart for my poor rabid friend. I think a zombie
dog bit him.
Urban Dead, however, is an interesting concept, but one that, alas, fails
in my eyes. There is no gradient of progress in this game. Either you
are able to leap the hurdle or you constantly attempt the bar. Once you
have made the bar (either through incessant dedication or consistent new
characters) you find that each subsequent bar is easier and passes faster
than the bar before it. It’s like drinking on Electric Avenue. You
drink more at the first bar than at any subsequent bar you go to. You
may travel the entire length of the Avenue of Alcohol wind up broke and
wasted by the end of the night. So, too, may you stumble blindly about
in Urban Dead, broken and wasted by the end of the night. Electric Avenue
only serves to get you drunk. There is no variance to the street. You
are not offset by interesting eateries, strangely closed day-time stores
or even dens of inequity (well, at least not anymore). So, too, is Urban
Dead. In order to attain level 2 you must do the same things you did to
attain level 1. You do not do different things in the game. There are
no quests to be upheld or NPC’s to wage war against. There are only
hastily cobbled together car hoods or pieces of desks to throw up against
the door to increase the difficulty of the zombie attempting to breach
the shore and sample your cerebellum.
I enjoyed Urban Dead. You will most assuredly enjoy it as well. It just
won’t hold your interest from now until the Zombies do, in truth,
arise. That is, unless you were the best man at my wedding and then I
do not doubt that you will be the South West Fire Captain for the next
20-odd years…. And not the sort of odd that says possibly more or
less… odd as in strange, different, creepy.
Kyle
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