Undead Nightmare Review

After many requests from their community, Rockstar has finally brought zombies into one of their games. It comes in the form of DLC for Red Dead Redemption, and includes both a single-player campaign and an online mode. The campaign takes about six hours to beat, is loaded with side quests, and is separate from the Red Dead campaign, easily accessible as its own option on the main menu. The fact that it separates itself from the Red Dead campaign really allows for some fun. It still uses many of the main characters from the original storyline, but they can be killed off unexpectedly at any moment. This keeps you on your toes, keeping the adventure fresh and exciting rather than boring and predictable. There is also quit a bit of humour thrown into the mix, where the story often mocks B horror movies, and the characters themselves react the to ridiculous happenings in hilarious ways.

I'm quite a big zombie fan myself, so I thoroughly enjoyed romping through the undead wild west, clearing towns of the hordes, rescuing survivors, and encountering mystical beasts. I also enjoyed the fact that zombies would deal damage to you by clawing, and attempting to grapple you, which makes a lot more sense instead of having them bite you, and somehow not infect you like a lot of other zombie games do. But I did feel that it was a bit too easy to survive since the zombies were pretty under-powered, and that they would've been a lot more intimidating if they could kill you in a couple of hits instead of a dozen. Another zombie-fanatic feature that I appreciated was how whenever an NPC was attacked, they'd actually come back alive as one of the undead, again something that many other zombie games should take note of. Some of the missions lack a bit of luster (one has you collecting those damned little flowers yet again), but some really take advantage of the scenario, and it overall leads to quite an enjoyable experience. All of the cut scenes are well-done, and the voice acting is yet again top-notch.

The Undead Nightmare pack came with two new online modes, one not having anything to do with the zombie theme. It's called Land Grab, and changes the regular free roam mode of Red Dead so that players can take control of certain areas, and defend them from enemies. It makes for nice territorial gameplay, where gangs can wage "turf wars" against each other, and overall weighs in as a great bonus to the DLC. The more anticipated mode of the two is titled "Undead Overrun" and faces players off against never-ending waves of the undead horde, much like a certain mode in another popular game franchise. Rockstar fortunately put enough of a twist on this mode to make it feel unique. Seeing as how you're able to just climb up building structures to avoid being mauled by the zombies (except for the spitters), there is a time limit in which you have to kill all of the zombies for the round. If the timer runs out you enter a "Sudden Death" mode where the rounds come to and end, and zombies continuously spawn until all players are dead. Since ammo is very scarce, and you only get refills when a new round begins, it's never long before everyone dies in Sudden Death. The game mode is quite well-designed and very fun once you get used to it, although some of the maps are a bit bland. My problem with it was that I found it to be a bit too competitive for my tastes. I was hoping they'd have a more casual game mode for multiplayer zombies, where players could freely roam the entire map, clearing towns and just surviving together, but unfortunately there wasn't anything of the sort.

Overall, Undead Nightmare is a very satisfying and awesomely gruesome experience. Throw in the fact that it's all bundled as a ten dollar DLC, and you got some serious bang for your buck. Whether you're a fan of the undead or not I'd recommend checking this out, and I can only hope that it'll generate enough success to prompt Rockstar into looking at revisiting this idea in their future games. I give Undead Nightmare a 9.5/10.