Some friends of mine and myself buyed the game last week, and had a great LAN session.
The game is a lot of fun, and when playing solo it's really kicking you in the nut - it's not an easy game (at least when coming to city chapter).
But there is some problems with the game too. Zombies hit you %'s of your health, so why the need for getting more HP each level? - nothing. Since, as said the zombies hits you % of your health, it does not matter how much health you have, it still hurts...a lot.. Also, it's bottering to drink 10 energy drinks / food to get back to full health, since the game does not auto heal you (well, it heals you to 1 blob on the HP bar, but when you have 10+ of them it's not to much of help
).
Also, zombies one shoting you by throwing a weapon on you a mile away from you... now that's just way to hardcore for casual gamers
Also, the head blobing is good and makes the game challenging, but it's way too much. Get hit by a zombie and you have no clue whats going on since the screen goes apeshit, and when you finally are able to understand whats going on - your dead.
I like the fact that you have to repair your weapons, but atm. it's kind of ridiciolus. Kill 8-10 zombies and it's time to repair your weapon again. All the money I earn in this game goes to repair my weapons. And when finally getting an epic weapon, what is the problem? - I don't have enough money to repair it. Sollution is of course to have several weapons, try to avoid fighting too much zombies, upgrade it - but again, that costs money. Did I mention that you lose 10% of your money when you die? A neat feature, but man.. if your not a elite gamer you'll find yourself losing all the money because of all the times you die
Bloom. God, why... whyyyyy?! It's even more intense than in NFS, it's SHOCKINGLY much. Luckily for me I found a mod who turns it off, and now the game looks so much better. Why the developers nowdays chose bloom? Game looks more crappier, my eyes and head hurts to it... and .. well I canot think of a good reason to have it. The only good thing / area to use it is when you exit a tunnel or building, then there could be a second or two of bloom to give it a realistic look (eyes takes time to adapt from light to dark, and the other way around).
You can break and cut off limbs of the zombies, which is great. Problem is that it seems random. I can swear that I aim and hit the arm, but it's completely random if it actually braks/cuts off. When I aim and hit the arm with a big ass sword, it should go off, not having a % of chance to beeing cut off.
The game also has various technical issues. One of them is micro stuttering, or what you call it. What it does is that when driving a car or turning around, the screen will do a numberous of small lags, which mainly is anoying, but also makes the game harder since it's hard to be precisly. Again, here there is a mod to help that, but why the developers have not done anything themself I do not know. The community seems to fix broken aspects of the game which the developers didn't care to give attention.
A other techincal issue is auto changing weapon, alcohol beeing used on pick up (means you get drunk when you in reality tries to pick them up and deliver them to a quest giver), not beeing able to store food - same as alcohol, beeing used no matter if you have full health or not, weapon beeing impossible to pick up from the ground just to mention some of them.
Also, the character selction / choises are not good enough. You have mainly 4 classes: 1 (black) man who is blunt weapon master, 1 (chocolate-color) man beeing throwing weapon master, 1 (black) woman beeing firearm master and 1 (anoying asian ****fest) woman beeing sharp/dagger weapon master. You have no way beeing a man and beeing dagger master, and you canot be a woman and beeing blunt master. So, I had to chose the anoying asian girl, which screams bullshit every 10 seconds, and wants me to skull**** her dead. 4 classes can be enough, but there should be possible to chose to be man/woman/ a little more options.
And lastly, the character animations. In holy mother of ****ing god, just... lol...rofl... lol.. It's super, super, super bad. When my lady jumps it seems like she is trying to take a powercrap in the air. She jumps up stiff as a rock, and when mid air she take her knees above the lower stomach and she helds them there til she lands. The developers clearly having a sick sence of humor, or they just hate asian people.
By all means, I enjoy this game, but it have it's problems.
But to shorten the text down a little I write some positive things about the game:
* Leveling system. It's fun having levels and character progression. Each class has it's own tallent tree, but even with it it's not overpowered.
* Game is challenging as ****, gives and rewarding feeling when leveling up and completing quests.
* If you take away the bloom and techincal problems, the game looks great!
* The atmosphere is good, you really feel you haveing a struggel for survival.
* It's a lot of fun doing modifications to the weapons. Puting a zombie on fire, or electricute it, or blast it, or even explode it, is a lot of fun!
* The music is good on some places, for example the churc.
* Fun to play coop togheter with friends through the game. More players - more monsters (like the sollution used in the Serious Sam games)
