How Do You Make Playing As A Zombie Fun?

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, zombie games have become a fixture in video game culture. All the way back to the Atari 2600, zombies have been used as video game for a variety of reasons. They’re slow, predictable, and you can set whole swarms of them on a player to create a seriously scary atmosphere. On top of all that, skilled players can show off their proficiency with headshots, turning enemies into a gory display of controller prowess.

So, who in their right mind would want to actually be one of these walking monstrosities?

Judging be the amount of games on the market that let you play as a zombie, not too many, unfortunately. I found a surprisingly small number of games on any platform that allow you to play as one of the shambling undead, rather than against them.

It seems like a losing prospect from the start. Zombies are, on a surface level, the poster child for slow and ineffective enemies who are easily out-maneuvered and outplayed. Unless you shake up their formula drastically, they just aren’t fun to play as.

So, it’s a good thing that Left 4 Dead shook things up, and shook them up hard.

Yeah, I’m just gonna get the big one out of the way first. Left 4 Dead made playing as a zombie awesome by creating several new and unique types of zombie to play as. No longer were zombies just lazy louts ambling slowly down city streets – no, they jumped out from shadows, exploded, or grabbed you by the head and disrupted your entire strategy.

Of course, the de facto way to play was online multiplayer, where you could harass and annoy other real people by ruining their day as a Tank or a Hunter. At the height of the series’ popularity, there were few things more satisfying than messing around as a zombie in the online play because it was just so satisfying to screw around with the four survivors trying their hardest to play the game properly. With your teammates at your back, a well-coordinated zombie strike could bring down even the most grizzled survivor, leading to laugh after laugh as you and your friends frustrated the other team.

By giving the player a variety of options, and making zombies fast, Valve made playing as a zombie fun. Granted, they needed to disregard a lot of “rules” about what zombies do in the process, but it all worked out for the best.

And then, on the other side of the “fun” spectrum, there’s Wario Land 3.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Wario Land 3 is a fun game. A really fun game, in fact. It sees you exploring a huge world, solving puzzles, fighting enemies and, despite Wario being too cool to die the game is challenging throughout.

And then you touch a zombie, and everything changes.

Wario has a lot of different forms at his disposal in this game, but his zombie form is probably the worst. It’s used as a form of punishment, in fact. Wario moves at a snail’s pace, is unable to jump, and falls helplessly down thin platforms – often erasing large chunks of your progress through vertical levels. You defeat all enemies on touch, but that’s not much of a consolation considering how hindered your movement is.

Of course, sometimes being a zombie is exactly what you need. There are some rooms and platforms that are only available by making Zombie Wario fall through platforms that regular Wario could never get through. Thoguh it massively hinders Wario’s ability to scamper about and slam into enemies, Nintendo used zombies (and their infectious bite) as a puzzle mechanic in a very effective fashion.

The only way to free yourself of this zombie curse is to drag Wario’s shambling corpse into a patch of light, or into some water, which is often positioned a long way away from where you actually need to be. Of course, you’ll hit the exact same zombie again next time you walk by him causing you to scream in impotent rage and throw your Game Boy Color across the room.

I mean, at least, I did.

You don’t actually have to play as a zombie to be on their team, though, as Ubisoft’s ZombieU showed us in 2012.

ZombieU as a game is… well, it’s fine. It’s ok. It’s good enough to play. It has some neat mechanics in the single player, such as using the Wii U’s touch pad as your inventory screen in real time, and having you fight old versions of yourself if you ever die. Story-wise, it’s an interesting take on the genre, since each time your character dies, they die for real. The next time you play, you’re playing as a totally different person who’s trying to pick up where the last guy left off. Other than that cool touch, though, it’s a pretty bog-standard zombie shooter.

And then there’s the multiplayer, which is unlike anything any other console has the capability of offering.

One player uses the TV to play as a survivor in a FPS arena, scrounging up weapons and trying to capture areas. Player two, however, uses the gamepad as a sort of small-scale RTS game, putting zombies down on the map with the stylus, and trying to thwart the efforts of player 1 from a bird’s-eye view.

While Player 1 dashes around the map in a mad panic to score points and fight off waves of zombies, player 2 plans ambushes and gathers resources to help spawn more enemies. It’s a game mode that’s tilted in player 2’s favor, since they can see the entire map and know what player 1 is doing at all times, but it’s up to player 2 to keep the pressure on at all times, making careful decisions between saving up resources or sending a few zombies in as a distraction.

I seems odd to me that a zombie-themed RTS game doesn’t exist at this time, but right now ZombieU is as close to that experience as it’s going to get.

I’m gonna round this little list out with one more example, Tales of Maj’Eyal.

Tales of Maj’Eyal, or TOME for short, is a turn-based roguelike released in 2012 for PC, and is based on a much older roguelike, Tales of Middle Earth (which is “coincidentally” also abbreviated to TOME). It’s a game that gives you, and pardon my use of scientific language here, roughly a billion million options in terms of creating your character. While not a literal zombie, playing as a skeleton does qualify as the living dead which, for my purposes, is close enough.

So yeah, a turn based RPG where you play as a skeleton, with all the statistics and properties of a skeleton. You can’t bleed, be poisoned, or drown. Plus, being dead, you can re-assemble yourself if you ever get knocked out of sorts. There are some drawbacks, though, since most people will attack you on sight unless you disguise yourself heavily.

Alright, so clearly, I’m scraping at the bottom of the barrel here. There aren’t, it turns out, too many games that let you play as literal zombies. That, in itself, is a bit of a shame because, as I hope this list demonstrates, even an enemy as handicapped and brainless as a zombie can be turned into a fascinating game mechanic with just a little creativity.

Valve made zombies into super-powered monsters to give the player a sense of power. Nintendo used zombies, and their infection, to give players both challenges to overcome and puzzles to solve. Ubisoft used zombies as a way to make asymetrical 1v1 multiplayer interesting for both sides. TOME uses the undead to make character creation more varied and, despite the obvious drawbacks of playing as someone who is literally already dead, shows how a creative designer can turn that into an advantage in an RPG.

The living dead have more uses than just being enemies, these days. With a bit of creative vision, a game designer can turn playing as one of the most boring enemies in gaming into a unique and interesting challenge, whether that’s through puzzle mechanics, character stats, or just using zombies as an excuse to give the player really cool powers. It’s a shame we don’t see stuff like this more often, because gameplay with handicaps built-in lends itself to creative thinking and more original game mechanics.

Now, I need to go make a game about playing as that first Goomba in world 1-1…

Edit: This article was written a few weeks ago. Since it was queued up for the blog, one of my recent favorite games, Streets of Rogue, had an update that lets you play as a zombie. You start out as a single zombie in this top-down brawler, but you can turn an entire floor to your side with a little work and hard luck. An excellent example of putting the strengths of the character to good use!