Review - Z-Runby Jon Evans
Format reviewed on Vita |
Developers; Beatshapers
Publisher; Beatshapers Formats; Vita Release Date 18th June (EU), 24th June (US) |
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We all like zombie games. They're very popular. Let's keep making them shall we? Z-Run is an endless (sort of) runner from Beatshapers. It presents you in the unenviable position of running away, or rather through a calvacade of our eponymous groaning, brain-eating friends. You can dodge, sprint, kick, slide and shoot your way through these annoyances as you reach your ultimate target, the end of the level. There are two different modes. Campaign and Survival. In campaign mode You also have a progress bar showing you how far you have left to run before completing the level. Campaign mode has you travelling through a map, essentially the progress of levels completed, until you reach your end goal. You choose your level before starting each game. You can replay any level, once they are unlocked as many times as you want. Survival mode, as the name suggests, is one long endless level presenting you with waves of zombies and the aim is to get as far along the escape route as possible.
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You are, of course, vulnerable and have two colour coded bars to show this. One is an Endurance (health) bar and the other, Stamina. Your endurance bar is reduced by being attacked by zombies or bumping into things (to be honest, the zombies are a mild annoyance compared to the environment, more on that later). Your stamina bar is reduced by running, sliding, melée attacks and kicking. You can pick up power ups which replenish these bars, and click the d-pad to use them when required.
Get the idea? I'm not a veteran of the endless runner. They are a recent gaming invention made for touch screen devices. They're snack gaming, and can either be a scaffold for cynical cash-mongering of children who are drawn in by the lure of free games or a simple, addictive piece of gaming that you can't stop playing. I've been spoilt by games like OlliOlli and Jetpack Joyride which perfected the endless runner genre and turned it into electronic crack.
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Herein lies the problem. The game becomes fun only near the final levels. Z-Run suffers in several areas. It is brutally difficult from the start. This means that newcomers to the genre will be put off straight away.This isn't necessarily a problem. Games, such as Flappy Birds are a finely honed work of genius, where the player is hooked in by the challenge of spot-on accuracy, blaming themselves for failing, not the game. But this requires an obsessive level of design to get this right. Apparently Dong Nguyen spent a long time getting the distance between the pipes just right to allow the bird through. There is some sort of perfect Euclidean algorithm used that allows the bird to just fit through in whatever arc they are flying.
Z-Run seems to conspire against you. The controls include x to slide, circle to kick and square to melée. This is a good arsenal of abilities, but are all tied to your all-too-quick-to-run-out stamina bar. The balance between depleted stamina bar and replenish pick-ups just isn't quite right for a new player to succeed just enough to want to continue playing. The first level gives you hints to the controls, but these hints obstructed the view on the screen and you don't have the option to turn them off, even after playing the level the 20th time. By sheer luck I completed the level, progressed to the next and the damned things finally disappeared and I could see where I was going.
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The environment, a dark forbidding suburban setting, littered with trucks, cars and too-many-to-be-believable roadworks signage is samey and bland, although randomly generated each time you play. The invisible walls of the scenery are constrictive, unclear and inconsistent when trying to traverse through the game. Triangle lets you jump over construction signs, and x lets you power-slide under flat bed trucks, however the height of the flat bed trucks is so close to that of the construction signage, you feel you should be able to jump them. Each time you try, you hit an invisible wall taking damage to your health bar. Once you hit these walls, be they masonry, columns or hedges, it is very hard to move away from them. Essentially; hit a wall and you're dead. Other weirdness included one level where the scenery completely disappeared and I was running through a black void, with no obstructions whatsoever for a couple of minutes before completing a level. Quite often my character would clip though car bonnets and open doors, but again this wasn't consistent.
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Occasionally you are offered alternative routes to travel through, with a more challenging turn at the end of them. flipping the right stick in whichever desired direction allows your character to dodge in that direction, but the controls just aren't responsive enough to be intuitive and again you have to learn the timing. At time of press the online leaderboards are not registering my score, but if you do get to grips with the gameplay, this could be a draw for replayability, allowing you to compete against your friends. Another annoyance; as you kick or slide into zombies, your screen becomes covered in their blood, making it harder to see your route in front of you. I agree, get hurt by the zombies and get penalised for it, but it seems that taking out Zombies puts you at a further disadvantage, rather than helping your progress. It came to a point, as I successfully took out wave after wave of zombies, the screen became one jam-ridden mess of blood, making it utterly impossible to complete the level. Perhaps I was playing it wrong, and the intention is to just avoid the zombies and attack them sparingly, but this is no fun.
You earn upgrade points as you play, allowing you to increase your Stamina and Endurance, as well as your agility, and weapon and ammo capacity. Later levels I got tooled up with weapons, like the mini-crossbow, the revolver and the wrench, which made the game more likeable and fun, and helped with the larger zombies that started appearing. These zombies couldn't be taken out with a slide or a kick, and I tended to save the cross-bow for them. Annoyingly, pressing the fire button, first unholsters your weapon before you can fire it, a frustrating feature that has to be repeated over and over again, as it isn't permanently unholstered while you run.
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Survival mode is the more authentic endless runner mode, with waves of zombies attacking you while you dash, slide, shoot and hack through them and maintain your levels with pickups. It is a purer game, and as you level up your abilities and inventory becomes more fun too. There is an enjoyable tipping point, where you become powerful enough to keep going, with enough spare supplies to make the distance and take out some zombies in your path. This fun came too late for me. The main game seemed like too much of a grind before it became enjoyable, and frankly didn't take long to complete either. There is a germ of a good idea here, which could have made for a fun romp through the streets. The level of difficulty is over-egged at the beginning with a flattening difficulty curve towards the end which seemed be the wrong way round.
Beatshaper games are generally very well priced and give you great value for money, but Z-Run feels too much like a free smartphone game rather than an Indie Gem. It might satisfy a few minutes of your time on the bus or on the throne, but for the sheer levels of frustration involved, rather than genuine fun, save your money.
Beatshaper games are generally very well priced and give you great value for money, but Z-Run feels too much like a free smartphone game rather than an Indie Gem. It might satisfy a few minutes of your time on the bus or on the throne, but for the sheer levels of frustration involved, rather than genuine fun, save your money.
Wrap up
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Good - The usual wry zombie-related humour. Interesting upgrade system.
Bad - Clunky controls, inconsistent gameplay mechanics, repetitive design, inverted difficulty curve. |
1/5 |
Images and review copy of game courtesy of Beatshapers.
