ZombiU arrived with the Wii U in November 2012 as a launch title, a first-person survival horror game from Ubisoft Montpellier, the studio behind Beyond Good & Evil and From Dust. It puts you in London during a zombie outbreak, and it asks a question most games avoid: what happens when you die for good?
The answer is the best idea in the game. When a zombie kills your survivor, that character is gone. You wake up as someone new, and the infected version of your old self is still out there, carrying your bug-out bag. Track it down, kill it, and you get your gear back. That loop turns every death into a small story and every street into a place you have to think about.
Trailer, via Ubisoft.
The Prepper’s Bunker and the GamePad
The Prepper, an ex-army man, contacts you and hands over weapons, a bug-out bag and the Prepper Pad, a device with a scanner and radar. He wants his safe house maintained. Dr. Knight, a physician at Buckingham Palace, wants something else: diaries and notes left by John Dee, the scientist who made the Black Prophecy four hundred years ago, in exchange for scanner upgrades and a virucide.
The Wii U GamePad carries all of it. Scanning the environment, managing inventory, checking the radar — the game never lets you forget the screen in your hands. That is the point. Ubisoft Montpellier originally pitched Killer Freaks from Outer Space, a fast shooter with small, agile monsters. The team retooled it into ZombiU once it saw the GamePad suited slower games. The change shows.
A Cricket Bat and One Bite
Combat is deliberately weak. You get firearms, land mines and Molotov cocktails, but ammunition is scarce. The unbreakable cricket bat does less damage than anything else. Zombies are sensitive to light and drawn to a flashlight or flare. Gunfire pulls them in. You can push them away with your weapon or use stealth to slip past.
One bite can kill you. That is not a figure of speech. The permadeath system means a single mistake ends a survivor permanently. Exploration is how you survive: beds act as save points, and searching areas or dead bodies turns up food, medkits, plywood scraps for barricading doors, and weapon parts you can use at the safe house to upgrade guns. New items open areas that were closed before.
The enemy roster keeps pressure on. Some zombies explode. Some are armored. Some spill corrosive fluid. Ubisoft Bucharest led development on the multiplayer portion, which the later port dropped.
Zombi on PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One
In August 2015, the game came to PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One as Zombi. Straight Right handled the port, which added new melee weapons and removed multiplayer. Critics were warmer on the Wii U original than on that version.
The influences are not hidden. Resident Evil, Condemned: Criminal Origins and Peter Jackson’s King Kong all shaped ZombiU. London was chosen for its mix of modern and historic architecture and its deep history, and the setting earns its place. Big Ben tolls over a city that has collapsed. The underground and the streets form a labyrinth, and the game wants you lost in it.
Here is the running order of what the game asks of you:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| November 2012 | Outbreak begins in London |
| Early game | The Prepper’s bunker; weapons, bug-out bag, Prepper Pad |
| Mid game | Buckingham Palace; Dr. Knight’s task; Dee’s diaries |
| Death | Permadeath; new survivor; recover your old character’s gear |
| Late game | Sondra leads you to the Ravens of Dee; helicopter escape attempt |
| After the crash | Return to the bunker; the generator runs low; find Vikram |
Key facts
- Release: November 2012, Wii U launch title
- Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Platforms: Wii U; Zombi on PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One, August 2015
- Mode: Single player and multiplayer
- Perspective: First person
- Critical aggregate: 7.8/10 from 10 outlets
What the Game Gets Right
The permadeath system is the whole argument. Most horror games let you reload and pretend the last five minutes did not happen. ZombiU makes the last five minutes permanent, and then makes you walk past the thing you used to be. That is a real idea, and it changes how you move through London. You check corners. You count bullets. You avoid the fight.
The GamePad work holds up for the same reason. Inventory management on a second screen sounds like a gimmick until you are doing it while a zombie shambles toward you. The game forces you to look down. That is tension built from hardware, not from a scripted scare.
The cricket bat is the smartest weapon in the game precisely because it is bad. It does less damage than everything else, and it never breaks. So you always have a choice, and the choice is always whether to make noise.
Where ZombiU falls short is in the parts that are not the loop. The plot runs through the Prepper, Dr. Knight, Sondra and the Ravens of Dee, and it never quite matches the pressure of the moment-to-moment survival. The multiplayer, handled by Ubisoft Bucharest, is a side attraction. The 2015 port stripped it out and added melee weapons, and critics liked that version less.
ZombiU is not a polished shooter. It is a game about being afraid of your own mistakes, and it commits to that idea harder than almost anything else on the Wii U. The 7.8 from 10 outlets is about right.
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