I still can’t believe the Wii U happened. Nintendo was on top of the world, but it learned all the wrong lessons from its legendary console and produced a successor that both failed to appeal to its hardcore audience and left casual players behind.
It was a commercial failure, and critics weren’t much kinder to it either, and now the majority of its exclusives have been ported to the Switch there isn’t much reason to own one at all. Except for Xenoblade Chronicles X, which Monolith Soft needs to hurry up and remaster before I burn down its offices. Nintendo Land also deserved better, but it was made with the hardware in mind and wouldn’t exactly translate to a new platform.
I thought the exact same thing about ZombiU, a launch title that was clearly designed to make use of the Wii U gamepad (hence the terrible name), so much so that tearing those mechanics away would make it come across as awkward and unwieldy.
It turns out that a port to PS4 and Xbox One only served to prove my point, with once tense moments of survival horror reduced down to goofy quick-time events and gameplay that no longer expressed an overbearing sense of anxiety. This conversion did a very good job of highlighting its other shortcomings too, with the hype of a new console release no longer protecting this fairly average shooter from scrutiny. Despite its flaws, it’s still a strange and oddly charming jaunt through a laughably cliched depiction of London.
You play as a nameless person who is trying to survive in the London Underground weeks after a zombie apocalypse has reduced the city to ruin. The UK has produced some of the most memorable stories to ever grace zombie fiction, so Ubisoft jumping into that setting and putting its own spin on things is a great idea in concept, but of course it bungles the execution. ZombiU’s London is all cockneys, royals, fish and chips, and bob's your uncle, proving right away that nobody on the development team has actually bothered to visit and see what the place is all about. The only melee weapon in the game is a cricket bat, and the second quest involves raiding Buckingham Palace in search of guns and supplies. The Tories probably would leave us all to die as it strived to protect the monarchy, so perhaps Ubisoft was onto something here.
ZombiU’s hook was ahead of its time. You play as random survivors, and your character is expected to die more than a few times throughout a single playthrough. When they do, they’ll rise as a newly christened undead and will be carrying all the supplies you left behind. You awaken as a new character in the safety of your hideout, ushered by a mysterious narrator known as ‘The Prepper’ to get back out there and continue marching for the cause. Having to risk venturing into a dangerous area to fight your corpse and losing precious supplies is a brilliant idea, and still works almost a decade later. I had loads of ammo, health items, and weapons when I first bit the dust, cursing to myself as I overextended into a place I had no business exploring this early on. Shame on me, but I wasn’t giving up without a fight.
Combine this with zombies that take several hits to defeat alongside a claustrophobic approach to level design, and you’ve got a survival horror masterpiece on your hands. Sadly it falls short at almost every other hurdle and relies far too heavily on gimmicks instead of ideas that actually prove enjoyable to play. The Wii U gamepad was used as a tablet of sorts, displaying the map and acting as a place to manage items on the move.
Whenever you needed to check your location, loot or tear down a door you’d need to look away from the television and focus all your attention on the tablet. This left you open to zombie attacks, adding a gamble to searching cupboards for rotting energy bars offering a only morsel of health regeneration. It’s cool, albeit gimmicky in retrospect, but at least it tried to use the gamepad in a fun way instead of throwing away the second screen experience entirely.
While it was scary at first, once you learned how to kill enemies in quick succession and how long it would take them to catch you it became a chore more than anything, and having to constantly backtrack to your hideout even with the help of occasional fast travel points the game was much too concerned with busywork to ever feel immersive.
Ports would remove this function for an on-screen map and standard button prompts, but without these extra flourishes the bland nature of ZombiU’s quest design and storytelling only became clearer. It was generic, repetitive, cliched, and sorely lacking in original ideas. This could have been the 28 Days Later of video games, but instead it feels more akin to a parody that isn’t sure when to take itself seriously. Phil Mitchell talking in your ear for the entire game about weird conspiracy theories and a London that is nothing like the real thing doesn’t help either. Even back then, the execution meant it wasn’t very interesting or fun.
Yet I still think it’s worth playing the Wii U version if you can track it down, if only to see what the console was pitching upon its launch and how absolutely none of those ideas would catch on. Ubisoft is always on the ground floor when it comes to new technology, and I’m glad it at least tried to produce a new IP instead of relying on tired old franchises. It’s just a shame the end result was so forgettable, and we’ll never see its true potential fulfilled.