Zombie Army 4: Dead War
PC, PS4, Xbox One
From Romero to The Walking Dead, zombie stories are hardly ever actually about the threat of the shambling horde. They’re about the threat of us, the ways we turn against each other in times of crisis. Man is the real monster, and all that – and rarely is this more evident than when you’re knee-deep in a multiplayer session of Zombie Army 4: Dead War with a squad of people you would previously have called friends.
Dead War is nominally a cooperative game – the four of you are fighting back the same waves of enemies, working towards the same end-of-level objective – but there’s not a huge amount of teamwork involved. Perhaps this stems from Zombie Army’s beginnings as a spin-off from the Sniper Elite series. While those games did introduce co-op modes, the fantasy they traded on was always about being the lone sniper in his nest, separated from the rest of the world by the glass of a scope. Dead War brings you closer to the action, taking foes that for the most part need to be within clawing distance to pose a threat and then throwing them at you by the dozen, so that individual headshots quickly become impractical (though never anything less than satisfying).
With a full squad and a seemingly endless horde to manage, multiplayer can get very busy, and your primary interaction with fellow players is generally getting in each other’s way. An ally walks right in front of that shot you’ve been lining up, or worse, blows your target back to hell themselves with a lucky shotgun blast. There’s no friendly fire to worry about, at least not where bullets are concerned, and while this is handy for keeping the peace it can make it feel like you’re all ghosts, haunting the same spot but on separate planes of existence.
Of course, in the grand tradition of co-op shooters, there is that one moment when players do have to rely on each another. Your character is downed, the colour draining from their world at roughly the same rate their life is trickling out of the red bar at the bottom of the screen, and so you shout into the microphone for help. Suddenly, you’re all comrades again… until you remember the Second Chance perk that lets you revive yourself by popping a nearby zombie, or the medkit that lets you self-revive, zapping any enemies in the vicinity in the process. Playing skilfully, with the right tools, players can become largely self-reliant – which means that, on the few occasions those options have been depleted and you do genuinely need each another, you’ll most likely find no one is especially prepared to help out.
This might, we admit, be partly down to our choice of companions. But Dead War never encourages you to work together. Instead, it plays – gloriously – to your worst instincts. A large swathe of UI real estate is eaten up by a combo meter and a mini leaderboard, constantly updating with each player’s score. These feed into a progression system, a series of levels that unlock new weapons, cosmetics and perks. We wish we could tell you we held the moral high ground and resisted the simple charms of a number getting bigger. The truth, though, is that chasing this score becomes all that matters.
Maintaining a solid combo is as gratifying as doing keepy-ups with a light plastic ball. A timer ticks away between each fresh kill, but slowly, giving you the chance to line up the next headshot, pull the trigger, punt the ball back into the air. Hitting 50, or 100, is a thrill. Letting that trickle away, then seeing all your exponentially inflated points land on the leaderboard in a single chunk, is possibly even better. With no numerical reward offered for helping your fellow man, it quickly falls down the list of priorities – especially when your fellow man is already a few levels above you and their score is leaving yours in the dust. So maybe you turn a blind eye, let them bleed out, just while you catch up. It’s not a mindset we’re proud of, but it’s one Zombie Army nurtures.
Dead War is clearly intended to be played with friends, but the solid fundamentals of its design shine through more clearly when you’re playing alone. There’s more time to find your sniper nest, set up trickshots that will pierce multiple skulls with a single bullet or lure zombies into carefully prepared traps, then revel in the gruesome X-ray killcam that follows. This is the game’s inheritance from Sniper Elite, and in multiplayer it all but fades away. Individual shots, and even kills, can feel inconsequential but for the resulting uptick in score.
Playing solo, you’re able to prod the nooks and crannies of each level, packed with visual gags and XP-boosting collectibles, without fear of getting left behind. The campaign’s range is more evident too – there’s a decent tonal variety here, from the odd jaunt into survival horror to all-out slapstick, that gets flattened out when you’re rushing through with friends.
The strange thing, though, is that none of this – the elegance of design, the inherent awfulness of other people and how much harder they make it to lie to yourself about your motivations – really matters. Because, as much as we might like to pose as a misanthropic hermit, the simple presence of other humans elevates any activity you do together. The tone gets flattened, yes, but into something that’s reminiscent of crowding around a communal television in the pre-Netflix days, watching whatever late-night movie is available just to talk over it. Dead War’s (intentionally, we assume) wonky dialogue and Monty Python-level European accents are perfect fodder for jokes, as is setting off an explosive trap – one of the few exceptions to the ‘no friendly fire’ rule – just as your comrade rushes past it. Especially when said comrade’s score is bigger than your own. So perhaps we are all monsters deep down, and Dead War’s multiplayer will bring out a side you probably ought to be ashamed of – but there’s something inherently funny about that. What’s a little depravity between pals, eh?
The solid fundamentals of its design shine through more clearly when you’re playing alone