A bit that will really drive you a long way

Hah – you thought that you would escape my zombie fanaticissm this week, but you haven’t! This week’s selection is Zombie Driver, the spiritual sequel to Zombie Chauffeur, the game adaptation of the BAFTA winning Driving Miss Zombie.

Disappointingly, your exploits are not narrated by Morgan Freeman as you crush zombies under your wheels, but hey, I expect he was too busy recording the voice of Gordon Freeman for Half Life 3. Oh wait, there was an NDA about that. Oh well.

Sooo... Zombie Driver? Another game from Excalibur Publishing, but unlike Zombie Chauffer, you’re not a sauve, rotten corpse, taking customers to their BDSM parties, but instead your job is to drive around a zombie-infested city.

Your goal? To rescue school kids, drunken sailors, paramedics, engineers, etc from the zombies in the street. The city is completely open plan, so you can drive anywhere you want at any time you want, spending your time shooting zombies with machine guns strapped to your cars, immolating them with flamethrowers, and adding their flesh to your radiator with the nitro boost. As a slight note, the survivors can get eaten by the awaiting horde if you take too long, so don’t enjoy the scenery too much. As you progress through the ‘story’ you earn more and more money, through cash bundles throughout the city, kill streaks, destruction of property and completing objectives. Each mission has a primary and secondary objective, for example a primary mission would be “Rescue 4 paramedics”, and the secondary would be “Rescue all 6 paramedics”.

Well. this can be a bit of a dilemma, as your original car was not once owned by a clown, and has a limited capacity for bodies. As you complete more missions and more extra objectives, you unlock new weapons, upgrades and vehicles. The taxi, in which you start, has a moderate capacity for 4 passengers, and has okay stats (speed, damage resistance and ability to keep your inertia as you plough through the zombies). Soon after, you can unlock the white limo – slower and tougher than the taxi, but with a capcity of 6, so for a bunch of missions, you might not have to return to base in the middle, to drop off the first survivors.

Money might seem to be a problem, but once you’ve picked up your survivors, you can drive around the city, without a timer. As such, you could possibly gather a horrendously large pile of money that would put a dent in US debt. See, I managed to throw politics into this week’s games.

The graphics for the game are actually quite good, but we’ve found a few people who get motion sickness from the game. I’m assuming that this is a VSync (or rather a lack of VSync) issue, as the game can move quite fast at times. I’d recommend a decent computer if you want nice visuals, without the barf bag. For those of you who don’t know what VSync is, it’s nothing to do with ‘N Sync. That would be horrible.

In-game sounds are fine (it’s hard to go wrong with groaning, and screeching tires) but the voice acting leaves quite a bit to be desired, but hey, that’s probably not why you bought the game. So, if you can find this game anywhere, I’d pick it up, as it’s a feel-good, endorphin pumping game, that requires little thought, but is still kinda tricky to pull off perfectly.

Until next week, it’s bye bye bye from the Games team! (FYI, I made up the Zombie Chauffeur thing. And I’m a spy.)