Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

Preview from Jae - Friday, 15 October 2010 @ 5:27am

This may sound like a familiar story line to many zombie-like games but the adventure is very much in vain of what Rockstar do best, which is action adventure in an explorative environment. The previewed mission begun with John getting off his zombie horse to talk to his old friend Seth. If you don’t remember Seth he was the grave robber that looked like that homeless dirty man. Seth is playing cards with his old friend Moses, who has taken the turn for the worst. It’s a pretty comical scene with Seth pretending to play poker with his undead friend. Seth sets the objective for John who wants to rid the land of the infection. To do so John will need to clear out graveyards and burn a bunch of coffins. There are five graveyards in total but don’t assume it’s an easy feat to clear them out. You’ll want to explore, gain more weapons and see all that has changed in the world since the pandemic.

Them hoes' are deadly

Like the original RDR heading to your main objective, in this case your first graveyard, will have you encountering many interesting missions along the way. For starters I spotted my first mythical creature. No it wasn’t a unicorn or leprechaun; it was one of the horses from the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It was a horse with fire for a mane and was very hard to tame. I spent a bit of time trying to lasso it down but realised I was pretty rusty with the controls in RDR. I was told that this was just one example of the mythical creatures that you can spot so perhaps there is still a chance you might see a unicorn! I then found a small town that had a handful of people defending themselves from the undead. At this point you have the choice of helping the towns people or leaving them to defend themselves. The benefit of helping them is to get some ammo and weapons but most importantly it provides a safe haven for you to save and fast travel. You’ll want to do these extra missions to help your main goal of curing this plague.

When you do reach a graveyard you’ll need to be prepared to fight off a bunch of zombies whilst trying to set fire to coffins. Everything is visible on your map but you’ll have to juggle zombies and coffins to clear out each graveyard. Much like some of our beloved zombie games of late Undead Nightmare has a selection of zombie classes. Apart from your average zombie there are Bolters, Bruisers and Retchers. Bolters are fast and leap at you but are short lived if you have some good dead aim, Bruisers are large and slow but make up for it with their strength. Retchers can projectile vomit further than I could when I turned 21 and let’s just say I was pretty good at the old bile train back in the day. The level of horror isn’t something that will have you wetting your pants but the constant zombie hordes do keep you on the edge of survival.

Who's been a naughty bear?

Last but not least the weapons in Undead Nightmare are pretty impressive. My favourite of the entire game so far is the Blunderbuss. This is pretty much a shotgun that is a one hit kill for one or more zombies in your target range. The difference is that its ammo it uses is human remains. So kill a few zombies with conventional weapons and loot their bodies for things like teeth which you can then pack into your Blunderbuss. The trade off with using this gun is that the zombies you kill will explode, which looks awesome btw, leaving no remains to loot. Other weapons were of the grenade variety such as holy water and zombie bait. The bait would bring all the zombies nearby together giving you an easy target. There is even boom bait which acts like a bomb for all the zombies that flock towards it. Sound like something familiar in another zombie game? Sure does but seeing it in the setting of the Wild West is kind of fun.

It’s been a little while since I fired up John Marston for a bit of hog tie and cattle rounding but the Undead Nightmare will give us all a reason to come back. The new downloadable content will see the world of Red Dead in a whole new light, literally. Undead Nightmare is available later this year for $15.95 on PSN or 800 MS Points on Xbox Live.