Platform: PSP
Developer: Tecmo
Genre: Action
Pros: Zombies invade a Dynasty Warriors game
Cons: Repetitive and cheap in difficulty
Verdict: Rent it, play it, return it, be done with it.
Price: $39.99
Acquired: Developer Provided Review Copy
Undead Knights is like Dynasty Warriors… with Zombies in it. This is, indeed, not necessarily a bad thing. These zombies, apart from most others you may have been introduced to in various forms of media, are begging for your love and affection. Yes, that’s right, these bad boys (and girls!) will do your diabolical bidding, killing, slashing and mutilating everything that you sick their grubby little brain craving mitts on. They might not bring you a cup of coffee in the morning, but they will beat up your neighbors. Which at the end of the day, is there anything else you could ever want from your family pet? While this has great promise for us zombie lovers, unfortunately Undead Knights is an ambitious title that borrows ideas from better games and then falls apart like the rotting flesh of your undead herd.
Undead Knights follows a typical story of redemption. As with any good plot involving royalty, things kick off when an evil king mercilessly slaughters an entire family. Those who said “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” seemed to be onto something, so you can only imagine what happens when an entire family is pissed and dead. Needless to say, this maniacal hybrid of the Brady Bunch and Manson clan return to the land of the living, wreaking death and destruction to all who stand before them.
Sure, the story has been done before. What has rarely been done however, is that upon returning to the land of Elvis (contrary to popular belief, not named after the King of Rock and Roll), you possess the ability to turn “Little Timmy” into a zombie. The power of gods have never been this much fun. If nothing else, this temporarily takes a ho-hum formula and makes it a bit more bearable. But lets face it, zombies could even invade a daytime soap opera and manage to make it cooler.
From beginning to end, there are 20 chapters to play through. Unfortunately, the developers did not use each stage as a chance to change the setting. Virtually every stage feels the same due to them either taking place in a castle, field, or some sort of forest area. Chapters lengths are a mixed bag at best, ranging from 5 to 15 minutes long, depending on the difficulty level and your familiarity with the map. Though this may feel cheap on length, do not fret. This is pretty much all you will be able to handle after the first few chapters.
The first major detraction from the game is that it’s pretty skimpy when it comes to multiple modes for the single player campaign. In all reality, calling it “skimpy” may be a bit generous considering that there is only one mode. Sure, there are three characters available , but the game play does not change based on one character or another, rendering it as nothing more than a glorified palette swap.
If there were one reason to play through multiple times, it would have to be the copious the amounts of achievements. There are fifty of them all together, which leads us to plead, “Please Sony..give us trophy support in our beloved PSP.” It would totally be worth the effort, if for nothing else than to add to the legs of this poltergeist of a game.
The game is played as follows: Run to an area, fight a bunch of enemies. This is followed by running to another area, then fighting some more enemies. Taking a page from the Ray Charles school of AI programming, if there is a second group of enemies in sight, they will behave like you are invisible. These moronic wastes of pixels will sit around and sip tea as their brethren are reduced to nothing more than piles of massacred man-meat. This might have been more acceptable had it not been for the horrible controls that stripped the fun away as though it were rotting flesh.
Thefts from the Dynasty Warriors franchise aside, another major component of game thievery victimizes the Overlord series. Commanding zombies to do your dark bidding is the second half of the game. Your undead army will go from group to group, chomping on whatever they can sink their incisors into. Too bad the developers didn’t also “borrow” color coded system where you could assign zombies to do specific tasks.
As the game progresses, small puzzles will crop up that you can only conquer using the rabid pack of brain dead droolers that double as your army. Crossing a gully or taking down an archers tower is all done utilizing whatever undead are at your disposal. It might have been more entertaining if these actions were more than just holding a button to initiate the horde to do your bidding. Though interesting at first, these useless diversions soon become another bump in the road of gameplay.
On another more bemusing note, who knew zombies would decay? Every movie I have ever watched featured the vanquished gray matter munchers lasting an eternity, at least until they were chopped up by an axe. Apparently that theory went right out the window because over time, zombies will decay and disappear, right before your very eyes. It is just odd when this doesn’t fit any of the precedents set before it.
Our next stop on the tour of game design issues that should have been left in the 90′s pays a visit to a good friend of virtually every PSP gamer, Mr. Craptastic Camera. The only thing worse than fighting off the doers of good is having to battle the camera at the same time! There were so many times that I would slip into a blood spilling groove, only to have it rudely interrupted by a camera that needed to be babysat like Michael Jackson at a “Make a Wish” Foundation summer camp. Gameplay degenerates into a never-ending process of getting back into a groove, attempting to slit my wrists and adjusting the camera again. Lather, rinse and repeat. If developers are going to make a game that is repetitive, please don’t make camera adjustment part of that cycle.
The only thing worse than a camera with a mind of its own is overcompensating hit detection. I don’t know where the coders got the idea that a hit box needs to extend out from your character by a mile, but it was unnecessary overkill. There are times you’re tasked with getting past various traps hidden within the environment. Nothing fuels a PSP hurling fury like successfully navigating a virtual minefield, only to find that a single misstep and a “Fat Albert” sized hit box has ultimately led to your demise. This whole ordeal just leads to some horribly cheap deaths, and even cheaper difficulty curves.
The environments here are nothing exceptional. Thanks to the fact that a healthy amount of characters can be displayed at once, the textures and detail take a backseat. The same character models are ctrl+c/ctrl+v’d across the board. This leads to a world that often feels empty, with little to look at. Lastly, the already limited library of available textures appear pixelated and bland. I would have settled for a bit less going on during the battles if it meant I could get some more to look at.
One nice touch is that blood will spatter across the screen as the zombie horde devours an enemy. It is a small thing to be happy about, but when you are afloat in a sea of mediocrity, even a mirage of dry land is a welcome distraction.
Returning to our previously scheduled woodshed beating, character animations seem very stiff and lethargic. It doesn’t help matters much when legs don’t appear to have knees, arms are sometimes missing elbows, and the occasional floating or twitching deceased will make a guest appearance. I know concessions had to be made for the number of units that the developers wanted to render onscreen, but we are not dealing with DOS based sprites anymore. Some of us do pay attention to how a character fits into the virtual world. Designing a character that is stiff legged is completely unacceptable unless they are making a beeline for the lavatories after being scared shitless.
The music will be a give and take type of relationship. Those who like heavy metal tunes should be pleased to no end. There are times that this works well and even enhances the experience. At other junctures in the game, the metal does not stop or even fade, resulting in what can only be described as an atmosphere of needless head-banging. The existing soundtrack works, but an understated variety would have gone a long way.
There are a fair amount of characters on the screen during battles, but too bad the AI sure didn’t bother show up to the party. I often found myself hacking up a horde of enemies, only to get stopped by picking up a zombie and using them as my dull sword. This wouldn’t be so bad if it were not for the fact that I then have to turn someone else into a zombie to replace the moron who inadvertently obstructed my path. Needless to say, Undead Knights keeps the AI of your minions as true to the mindlessness most movies portray.
Undead Knights is a game that take two distinctly different games, smashes them together into an unholy masterpiece of mediocrity, vomits zombie bile all over them, and calls it a day. The game is not horrible, but it is not great. It is best to play a stage or two at a time, before the camera and repetition infects you with rage. Rent this one so you can behead, hit, and return this corpse to its owner.
Popularity: unranked [?]
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