“With the Wii U gamepad, we can bring back slow paced, scary moments to the survival horror genre,” that is what is said in this ZombiU developer diary, as if games like Amnesia never happened. No, only with the power of TOUCHING A LITTLE SCREEN can horror games be scary anymore. Oh, the hyperbolic hubris!
Still, the game looks spooky and has some interesting ideas. I like the fact that, if you die, you need to take over a new character and kill the last one — now a zombie — to get your things back. That’s pretty awesome. Also, there are Buckingham Palace guard zombies. What’re the odds that there’ll be ten times as many zombie ones as ones that exist in real life? It doesn’t matter, they look hilarious.
I’m eager to see more of this, but I’m not exactly excited by the requirement to stop playing the game in order to move the controller around or diddle with a touch screen. I like touch screens if they’re incorporated into the flow of the game, but not if they act as a buffer between on-screen action sequences. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how elegantly Ubisoft manages it.
