PC & console game reviews
Take a seat on the crazy train.
If you’re wondering where the first three Zombie Army games went, you’re probably not alone. Rebellion’s undead Sniper Elite spinoffs began years ago on PC before a new third game was packaged with the first two and launched for all platforms back in 2015 as Zombie Army Trilogy. The trio didn’t make a lot of noise critically and playing Zombie Army 4 feels like the true debut for the series as it’s now fully fleshed out and distances itself from its roots as something closer to a mod than a new series. As a third-person Nazi zombie shooter, no-one would suggest Zombie Army 4 is a novel concept – even its years-old debut already followed a long line of games depicting a similar world, but its merits exist beyond its story setup.
To care about the story in Zombie Army 4 is misguided, and generally feels like more effort than the dev team expects of you. Zombie Army 4 can and likely will be played out of sequence when you’re jumping into its nine hour-long (or longer) levels because the nature of its matchmaking system doesn’t seem to prioritise where you left off. Ultimately the game survives this disarray because most of its mechanics work well and it’s paced relentlessly, not to mention it benefits from the almost unanimously true adage of “everything’s better in co-op”.
This means you can focus on having fun with your friends while slaying the undead, including an impressive array of special types, by the hundreds in every chapter, and explore the game’s weird and wonderful campaign. After seeming adequately hinged in the opening level’s train station, the story brings players to several absurd landing spots like a would-be love cruise down the canals of Venice, an abandoned zoo, and a research laboratory, because no game this gleefully schlocky would be complete without a phony science
experiment playing host to amped-up super zombies.
That’s the thing about Zombie Army 4. Though it depicts an alternate history view of World War 2, it does so through very 80s-tinted glasses. Its synthheavy soundtrack, over-the-top storyline, and era-appropriate monster movie posters decorating each loading screen all sell the game’s promise of a campy, gory horror show we’ve all caught at some weird hour on a channel we didn’t know we were paying for – or these days, buried in our streaming library. Zombie Army 4 revels in its world of darkly magical, limbsevering, unabashed genre tropes. It hopes you’ll take a seat on its crazy train. I did, and I loved it as a result.
Zombies. Nazis. Armies of same. And you shoot them. What more do you want?
Mark Delaney
To care about the story in Zombie Army 4 is misguided, and generally feels like more effort than the dev team expects of you.