Red Dead Redemption

This generation of consoles has been kind to Rockstar Games; GTA IV broke all previous sales records, both The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony were well received by critics, and Red Dead Redemption reinvigorated western video games. This was also the generation where Rockstar set aside the 69 jokes to pursue more dramatic story arcs. So it is sort of strange that Undead Nightmare exists. It essentially comes off as a zombie B-Movie version of Red Dead proper, full of corny dialogue and plenty of outrageous death scenes. But poor pacing, dull mission design, repetitive gunplay, and a general lack of variety mire the wonderfully ridiculous premise and make this the weakest Rockstar DLC yet.

The story has us controlling John Marston just as he makes his way home to start building his ranch with his family. Just as things start to settle in, John’s wife and son are bitten by the undead that seemingly show up out of nowhere. It is up to John to find some sort of cure so that he can live a normal life. I recommend playing through the main story before playing Undead Nightmare just to know all of the characters that show up and understand some of the references to the main game.

If you did play the first game, you’ll notice that the New Austin landscape, and the menus have acquired a sickly, green tinge. This is a big change from the reds and yellows of the original game. It goes a long way towards establishing the environment and the premise, which is excellent. Undead horses and cows roam freely, giant bats shriek at the pale green moon, and even some mythical creatures show up to add a mysterious, creepy vibe to the world. All this (plus, you know, the zombies) helps to make the game feel like a reimagining of the original and, to my knowledge, there has never been a zombie western game, book, or movie. Dialogue really shines in the beginning; hearing surviving jawless yokels blame the zombie virus on bad meat, the federal government, and Bigfoot makes for some hilarious situations, and establishes a tongue in cheek tone.

Unfortunately, this tone doesn’t last as the story takes a turn into seriousness about two hours in. This tone shift doesn’t make much sense considering that this is a zombie western. Suddenly you’re expected to feel sorry for certain characters and zombies that you’ve killed. It completely diminishes the black humor of the first few hours and leaves the middle section of the game pretty bleak and unappealing. It isn’t until the very end that the game manages to reclaim some of the former silliness.

It is also a shame that this tone shift happens mid-game because the game play and pacing start to grow stagnant when the tone shifts. Most of the missions are based on one of four templates: saving towns, saving stranded citizens, burning graveyards, or capturing zombies for doctors to run tests on. Saving towns from the undead is fun at first, but it grows boring when there is no deviance in process: you roll into town, find the survivor leader, get bullets for the leader, shoot zombies, then move to the next town and do the same thing. Graveyard cleansing (to cut down the undead in their home turf) and zombie capturing (self explanatory) are the same sort of affair. Stranded citizens at least give you new weapons to play with once you bring them to safety. These side missions all seem like filler and the interesting story missions seem to slow to a trickle until the last few missions.

It also is a shame that all the gunplay accompanying these boring missions is based upon headshots. In Red Dead, shooting an outlaw in the leg had real tactical advantage; it gave you the opportunity to move up from cover and finish the job with a chest shot that felt visceral and truly violent. Undead Nightmare throws that all out and even makes taking cover pointless. The zombies charge as soon as you get within 100 feet of them, forcing you to run or find higher ground, and will not die until shot in the head, or set on fire. In my experience, fire didn’t really kill the zombies fast enough, and sometimes it didn’t kill them at all. Barely outrunning zombies, and sometimes not outrunning them, brings great tension to each fight, but having to aim for the head every damn time is difficult unless you use the Dead Eye aiming (slow-mo aiming) that was in the original game.

There is a lot to like in Undead Nightmare’s story and dialogue, but a bloated middle section full of uninspired side missions and bad story decisions drags it down. The question you have to ask yourself is, “Is the premise of a zombie western B-movie enough?” For me, even at just 400 Microsoft points it was barely so.