Quick Look: Zombie Army 4: Dead War

Someone forgot to add Jeff and Ben to the cast.

I've been waiting for this to come out! I feel like the SENZA games didn't get as much love as they deserved.

That's a hell of a Deadspace stomp.

If Jeff wants to see some jittery movement, he should try creeping up some stairs in Sniper Elite 4. Karl's clearly afflicted by the Jimmy Legs.

Giant Bomb, as a whole, needs to play the World War Z game again, because it's a hell of a lot of fun.

These games: it's just like seeing another Tetris iteration, only that Tetris went through more changes...

Jeff was clearly feeling a bit pissy this day, unable to just enjoy a fun game.

@engineno9: Thats just Jeff’s..je ne sais quoi

Please make sure you also play the recent Walking Dead game (Saints & Sinners), it's good and too few people know about it.

Fright, Fight, or Alight!...

A little heavy for first thing in the morning at first, but pretty fun to watch.

I'd be interested in seeing how all the sniping mechanics would play in. I doubt it's ever like one of the arma zombie mods where you're domin' zombos from 600m out, but there's quite a lot of mechanics for sniper rifles in the... Sniper Elite games.

@grondoth: I picked up Rebellion's "Zombie Army Trilogy" on Steam (after watching Game Informer play through ZA4) and I'm actually impressed at the physics that go on under the hood. Wind, bullet-drop, and heartrate all affect accuracy (but can be turned off, based on game difficulty settings), and the hit-location on the targets is down to pretty minute detail -- for example, you don't just shoot-zombie-in-head; there are around a dozen head-specific locations to send a bullet through, depending on your elevation, target's orientation, and which exact part of the head you were aiming for. The games even track the bullet fragments after they exit the zombie's body, so you may hit two or three zombies with a single bullet if they're lined up right.

This is all stuff that I'd probably find disturbing on a simulated human body, but it makes for dumb, visceral fun when shooting Nazi zombies. (Nazombies?)

Zombie grapes? Dead, dead wine...

This looks generically boring.

Why play this game at all when Vermintide 2 exists?

Gooooes to my heeeeeadshoooot.

Sweet zombie wine

*ba ba baaaaaaaaaaaaaa*

good times never seemed so good!

I really like playing ZA4 but I find myself getting very tense to the point of after a few levels I have to stop playing. Maybe because I’m playing alone and don’t like to die / find myself overwhelmed by mean zombies. The random jump scares don’t help either.

Because this is a completely different game, in a different setting, based on ranged weapon combat against a variety of zombies?

Wow this looks real rough after playing Remnant From the Ashes and Resident Evil 2 Remake. If you like third person shooters those two games are on another level. This looks exceptionally generic.

Fun quick look! Is it just me or does the camera feel a bit low and zoomed in, kept feeling like I wanted to see what was behind the character on screen.

@engineno9: He's always like this. Hes been doing this for years and is getting sick of stuff that people like when its not to his liking. He wants phenomenal stuff and this isn't knocking his socks off. He's happy. Jeff's happy meh, is equal to a youtuber spazzing out.

It was great that you could get east and west to play together for this. Having everyone in on it helped keep the energy high(er), and made for a fun episode to watch.

@madmatt213: I've been thinking about getting that game but don't have any friends to play with. Is it easy to matchmake with randoms?

@killerkidclever: I play with friends, only occasionally match with randoms, but I've never had a problem (on PC Epic Store). I know they said they sold over 2 million copies across the 3 platforms back in May 2019, so I'd expect many are still playing. They're also incorporating cross-play between all the platforms most likely within the next month, so that should make it easier to matchmake too.

I genuinely appreciate that despite having amongst the least experience in gaming/quick looks, Abby consistently makes a point of explaining mechanics that may not be immediately obvious to a viewer. I feel like most of the other duders are so inured to game systems, they don't even consider it anymore.

a great QL!

Looks alright although the environments look kinda dull, but maybe that’s just the beginning of the campaign and then it gets more interesting.

Cross-coast content!

Man, Jeff, dude.

Abby: "I like playing games like this with friends."

Jeff: "Zombies are dumb."

Abby: "...I uh...yeah, well, I like playing mindless shooters with friends, you know?"

Jeff: "There are better games for that."

Abby: "...so how's it going Vinny?"

You know it's a slow start to the year, when there's 5 ppl doing a nazi zombie army quick look.

Loved this ql.

So basically it’s the 1st world of Remnant stretched into a whole game, without the slightly interesting enemies, plus traps.

Stomping kinda redeems it though.

@humanity said:

Yup. Par for the course, unfortunately. Jeff often decries the lack of B-tier games, and then craps all over them when he comes across them. It's one of the particular quirks of this site.

Not like she doesn't do the same to others though

...except for the B-tier games that he likes, of which there are several.

People always seem to forget that (like movie critics with movies), game-reviewers play a bajillion more games than the average consumer does. This might be the only game featuring Nazi-Zombies that the average gamer plays within the past few years. This is probably the 23rd-or-so nazi-zombie-shooter that the professional game journalist has played in the past few years.

(Tangentally, I REALLY wish some video game developers just went all-in on the Weird Wars IP. With supplements like "Africa Korpse", "Land of the Rising Dead" and "Hell Freezes Over", an otherwise standard "Occult WW2" setting could be enhanced with idea of SS Blood-mages and vampires; Imperial Japanese scientists "recycling" kamikaze pilots to launch suicide attacks again...and again...and again; Soviet scientists creating human-ape hybrids while Baba Yaga indiscriminately wrecking everyone's shit and the Allies OSS messing around with telekinetic and psychic covert operatives, this type of game could be so much more than "shoot the AI that slowly walks toward you".)

@dasakamov: I should have prefaced that with "occasionally" - of course it's not that way for every single game.

Jeff doesn't like it

I mean Jeff isnt wrong. This type of game has been done billions of times and in different formats, from Vermintide to L4D to Strange Brigade.

The Risen to the Rank of Captain was a meta joke!

Jeff might get flak for being the 'stick in the mud' here, but i do feel like the other guys mostly leave it to Abby and him to perform the quicklook aspect of the game. Informing the viewers. Don't get me wrong, this looks very fun to play with your buddies, but at the same time this is a run of the mill B-game that hardly brings any new ideas to the table and deserves some criticism in an editorial video that will be viewed by thousands. Up until Jeff started to push back, it was 100% praise & enjoyment from Abby, Ben & Vinny. And that's totally understandable, this looks like a fun time, but someone had to be there to point out that the X-ray mode might not play nice with the coop mode. That the shooting might not be best in class. That the animations are somewhat poor. That this dev also did Strange Brigade, which has a more interesting theme to it. A fun game can still have it's faults.

Also, did Alex have a bad experience with World War Z the game? I though that game was pretty well received and somewhat more interesting than this one given it's sheer amount of zombies and ragdoll physics. I remember people thinking a WWZ game in 2019 would have to be kind of bad, but then we found out it was actually pretty good. Maybe Alex didn't get past that initial feeling that it would have to be bad? Oh well, we all have our likes & dislikes