Zombies on the loose

Into The Dead 2 is an interesting zombie shooting game with beautiful graphics and creepy atmosphere, writes Mohd Noor Aswad

The Justice shotgun can make short work of the zombies.

Meet your post-apocalypse ‘friends’. to run through what seems like middle America, with farm land, corn fields, small town suburbia, military installation, and a train station, among others.

The background is also dynamic with wind effects, swaying grass and, at one point, a burning train passed in front of me, making me wonder what horror took place inside the burning carriage. The design of the world really invokes a sense of dread and creepiness which really says something for a mobile device game.

The only letdown in the graphic department is the zombie designs. Granted most of the time you will be wheezing past them to take notice of their looks but more often than not when one of them grabs you and starts eating you, you get to see firsthand the zombies in their glory. And, oh my, they are ugly. Okay, there may not be such a thing as a beautiful zombie, but their design in this game looks really crappy. Like a pixelated crayon drawing up close. Really!

However, I would also like to note that the game does allow you to tweak the graphics settings from low to high. While most gamers prefer their games in all the maximum graphic capability, but on mobile, you really need to take into consideration battery life.

The low graphic setting, while making the game look less accomplished, does make the game speedier and saves your phone battery for a prolonged gaming session. I salute the developer for providing this option and I hope other graphic intensive games give the same options to players in the future.

GAME MECHANICS

While is no longer an endless runner in a way, the game mechanics is still a first person runner. Your character • Upgraded graphics. It’s a

beautiful game.

• Tense atmosphere.

• Killing zombies is always fun. • Good storyline and plot.

still runs and you can only manoeuvre it left and right until you reach your target distance which is set by the game.

Your character is provided with a simple gun from the start, with limited ammo. You can only replenish it by running over the weapon cache that is randomly placed in the field in front of you, highlighted by green flares. When I first played through the first chapter, all I was focusing on was to conserve my bullets till I reached the target distance.

While conserving ammo is the logical thing to do in a survival horror game,

puts in the challenge for you to kill a certain number of zombies to get a star point which can be accumulated to open the next chapter of the game. So like it or not, you need to load your bullets into the undead to proceed further into the game chapters. While it is certainly satisfying to kill a horde of zombies, you will learn true tension when you run out of bullets in a field full of zombies.

THE ONLY NEGATIVE

As you go deeper into the game, it starts providing the player with lots of weapons to get rid of pesky zombies. From simple guns, rifles and assault rifles to shotguns, the game has it all. Unfortunately, this is where the game rears its ugly head. If you want the best weapons early, you have to pay for them with actual money. So imagine my surprise that for a Justice shotgun (high bullet capacity shotgun), the game was asking me to pay RM20 to own the weapon early!

So it’s basically a pay-to-win type of game as the later levels really require you to kill a lot of zombies and only high calibre weapons can really do the job. Trust me, just using a puny gun and shotgun can’t pull in the number of kills needed to acquire the star points to unlock the next chapters. Sure you can play the game in a normal mode to unlock the weapons but it will take a lot of hours to grind for them. Unfortunately, this is the current state of games nowadays where in-app purchases are the norm.

CONCLUSION

Despite the pay to win mechanics and selling game guns for real money, I would still recommend to gamers just for the great story modes and fun zombie killing action.

You can still play most of the game without paying extra money and the grinding is really not that bad. My only advice is to not get overly obsessed playing this game as the frustrations in getting all the stars to unlock the next chapter may induce people to spend more money than they should on weapons and perks that can push them ahead faster and easier.