Leading up to the New York Comic Con, one of the games I was looking forward to the most was ZombiU.  ZombiU is a first person shooter for the Wii U, where a zombie outbreak starts in England.  A lot of major video game sites made this game sound like the reason to buy a Wii U.  Unfortunately I wasn’t entirely impressed by what I got to do.

This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad game.  The hands on that I had, was only with one of the two offline multiplayer modes.  We chose to play Survivors Vs King of Zombies.  I had the Wii U tablet in hand while my partner used the Wii U Pro Game Controller.  This mode of the game lets the person with the pro controller play on-screen in a first person view, while the person with the tablet acts as the zombie king and spawns zombies in certain areas to attack the player, in a capture the flag game.  As the game goes on the Zombie King levels up and gets to choose upgraded harder zombies to throw at the other player.

Overall I think this is a great idea, and an innovative mode, but it fell a bit flat for me.  You can only place so many zombies at any given time so I was waiting for the other player to kill them before I could spawn more.  Most of my playtime involved me waiting for my zombies to die.  Also the graphics weren’t as impressive as I thought they should be.  I feel like it looked on par with the first Left 4 Dead, which isn’t a bad-looking game, but its 4 years old now. ZombiU should have looked a bit better than that.

On the plus side the tablet worked really well.  On the tablet screen you are presented with a map of the level, and you can see where the player is on your screen.  So you know where to place your zombies.

I haven’t tried the first player mode so perhaps this will be more interesting/fun, but as of right now from what I’ve played I can’t recommend ZombiU.  I’d definitely recommend waiting for final reviews before jumping into this game.