The disappointing part is that Dead Nation sounded like it should have been great. Your 15 bucks gets you 10 mildly story-driven levels full of monsters to shoot, and there's a light progression mechanic where your performance earns you gold that you can cash in to upgrade weapons ranging from a shotgun and rocket launcher to a flamethrower, blade-hurler, and electro-zap something or other. You can play those 10 levels by yourself, or with a friend in local or online co-op. Everyone with me so far?
The core problem is the way the game plays. From the get-go, Dead Nation's shooting felt off to me, and even as I upgraded my gear, it never got more enjoyable as the overly long campaign wore on. The camera is pulled further out from the action than I would have liked, making your targets small and relatively hard to aim at (especially since only the default rifle gets a laser sight). The aiming is a little squirrelly anyway, combining with the small targets to make the game feel less precise than the great dual-joystick shooters of the last few years. And that default rifle is the only gun with unlimited ammo, so you tend to rely on it a lot--but it's a single-shot-single-button-press weapon, so my index finger felt like it was just about ready to fall off by the end of the game.
If the core shooting was more fun to play, the relative lack of variety in Dead Nation's campaign levels would be easier to cope with. The vast majority of the game is composed of same-looking city streets and generic urban areas, with cars strewn all over the place. Admittedly, the cars have real strategic value since you can shoot them to set off their alarms, which attracts the horde until the car explodes, just like in Left 4 Dead. Actually, most of this game feels... just like Left 4 Dead. Among the zombie lineup there are direct equivalents of the boomer, spitter, and tank, and you'll find yourself in familiar locations like a hospital and a carnival, in the latter shooting zombie clowns. This stuff has been done before.
At least Dead Nation looks great. That lighting that impacted the quality of the action for me does look nice and moody, and there are some great physics that send zombie bodies flying right at the camera when you set off a big explosion. But it doesn't matter how slick a game like this looks if the action isn't on point. Housemarque has proven in the past it clearly has the chops to make great shooters, but it doesn't feel like that skill was fully brought to bear on this one.
133 Comments