E3 2012: ZombiU - Wii U's brightest prospect?

June 7th, 2012, 00:32 Posted By: wraggster

ZombiU has appeared three times so far this E3. A gory CG trailer, shown during Ubisoft's press conference on Monday, revealed its London setting and piqued our interest; another trailer, sadly also CG and aired during Nintendo's conference today, showed the ways in which it makes use of the Wii U GamePad. It's the below gameplay demo, though, coming hot on the heels of Nintendo's middling E3 conference, which has propelled it to the upper echelons of our Wii U most wanted list.
For a start, it's a Roguelike: one bite and you're gone for good, respawning as another survivor of London's zombie apocalypse. You can then hunt down your previous character, who's now a zombie, to reclaim your backpack and, therefore, your inventory. When you die, you don't just lose your avatar and supplies: there's a levelling system of sorts too, with unlockable skills which will also be lost should you perish.
That inventory is managed using the GamePad, all in realtime, and the Wii U controller can also be used as a sonar scanner or sniper rifle. Combine that with permadeath and you've got an instantly more unsettling game than most of ZombiU's survival horror peers, which provided an unrealistic, if admittedly entirely welcome, respite from the terror with a single panicked stab of a button. When playing Resident Evil 4, for instance, we always wondered if we'd really be able to switch weapons or take healing herbs with a shuffling horde of undead bearing down upon us.
It's intriguing stuff, and brave from Ubisoft too, especially after Nintendo's conference leant more towards the casual than the core. This, by contrast, is about as hardcore as it gets, a sort of offlineDay-Z with no-one else around to spoil it for you. There's no indication of release date, but if this is on shelves on day one, Wii U's fortunes are already looking up. Below, then, in order, are the cinematic CG trailer, the CG GamePad trailer, and finally the gameplay demo, courtesy of Spike.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/e3-2...htest-prospect

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here