Review: Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse - Xbox

Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains

Thursday, November 3, 2005

QuickView:

Good: Great presentation, humor and music

Bad: Core combat needs refining

Get: The soundtrack

Stubbs is a smooth ex-salesman zombie trapped in the 50’s/future hybrid world of Punchbowl. The naïve optimism that pervades the community doesn’t last too long once Stubbs gets to eatin’ brains and farting up a storm. Yeah, that’s what I said.

Wideload Games founder Alex Seropian left Bungie after Halo 1 to pursue his own ideas. As a favor, Bungie let him take the Halo engine to use for this first Wideload project. Even thought the engine shows its age a bit, it still proves to be one of the smoothest and prolific engines to build a game from. It’s evident in the menu systems, great control and fun physics. But how does the game itself feel?

Stubbs can attack, eat brains to get special powers, fart, use your guts as grenades, your head as a bowling ball bomb, use other people’s limbs as melee weapons and use your hand to possess people to use their firearms.

Once you start possessing people, the feature will become the most addictive. Not because it’s necessarily the most effective, but because it provides the best bang for your buck. Wielding several different weapons feels better than the core combat given to Stubbs. When several cops surround you, you can usually call all the zombies in your clan to come to your aide. But Stubbs by himself doesn’t have the greatest mobility. That coupled with some too-open or too-closed level design makes it almost impossible not to get hit with gunfire before you get close enough to eat brains.

Even if you are close enough, it will take a certain amount of pummeling to get the enemy woozy enough to allow for the brain-eating. While you’re in that close combat scenario, it becomes a button masher with no real strategy other than to outlast the other guy. There is no real way to defend or dodge besides farting to stun your surrounding enemies. It’s a bit sloppy.

The vehicles are a blast, however. You can control a hover truck, a sod launcher and a jeep that feels strikingly like Halo’s Warthog. Regardless, these are probably the most exciting sequences the game has to offer.

The enemy AI is pretty basic and gets harder as you progress. Keeping your fellow zombies alive starts to become a waste of time since the harder enemies far outweigh that of your idiot minions. This is also when the lack of mobility sort of hampers the fun. However, if you play in co-op mode, the extra human-controlled player becomes a distinct advantage, compensating for the solo mode’s lack of speed.

Some of the levels are fairly confusing as well. Many repeated corridors and identical looking intersections and rooms combine poorly with a general lack of direction to make the Stubbs universe pretty disjointed. As a result, the game usually hits its stride in open environments when you get to possess people.

The music and sound, however, are superb. There’s nothing that catches the 50s feel like “My Boyfriend’s Back” or “Mr. Sandman” blasting through the speakers from modern bands. Don’t fret, each remake of the classic tunes are really well done. The sound effects splat and gurgle well, complemented by the horde of your zombie buddies constantly chanting “braaaaaains.”

The overall feeling from Stubbs is positive. The presentation is very fun, the humor is good and the sound is superb, but the core combat could use some refining to make Stubbs a classic. Also, the game can be blown through in a few hours, which I need not tell you is pretty short for any current action game. But make no mistake; Stubbs is something everyone should experience at least once, if only for the fresh approach to the action genre.

Graphics: B-

Sound: A

First Play: B

Last Play: C+

Gameplay: B-

Overall: 81% B-

Comments

lawrence.com does not necessarily agree with comments posted below - responsibility lies with the relevant user alone. Read our full policy

Review: Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse - Xbox

Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains

Comments

Post a comment