It’s 1959 and the city of the future has just been built. Punchbowl, PA has clean streets, fresh air, and docile teenagers. It is the nearest Man has ever come to building the utopian city. The one small flaw is that there is a zombie shambling around town eating people’s brains.

Game Play:

Stubbs the Zombie is a 3rd-person action game. It isn’t a shooter as most of the combat is hand to hand, though guns are available in a roundabout way. There aren’t any complex puzzles and jumping is never neccessary.

What the game does have is buckets of blood and gore, so much so that certain video game industry watchdog groups have cautioned people away from buying it. They say, to paraphrase, that the game revels in an orgy of cannibalism and violence. If one plays this game he will find his moral fiber shredded, sense of right and wrong vanished, and possibly become a myopic antisocial git who writes video game reviews.

All of this is absolutely true– the only part they left out is that Stubbs is damn fun to play. Eating brains not only replenishes health and ammo, but the victims rise from the dead to munch on more gray matter. Their victims in turn rise from the dead, and so on and so forth until Stubbs is the leader of his very own horde of undead.

For weapons, Stubbs has a trusty arm-swipe attack that quickly dispatches enemies. In addition, he can remove part of his entrails and throw them as a grenade, fart for an area effect stun, or rip off his head and roll it like a bowling ball. The final attack he has is removing his hand and moving it about until he finds an enemy to possess. The hand latches onto the skull and you control the enemy and can shoot his gun.

One may be thinking that all of this sounds great, but also that zombies move slowly and this must make the game tedious. In a way it does, but if Stubbs moves continously for a short period he breaks out into a slow run. For extra speed, Stubbs can drive some vehicles, such as jeeps, tractors, and tanks. The tank can of course also blast things to pieces.

Cons:

The whole game is blurry. I’m guessing they did this to make it look like an old movie. This adds to the ambience of the game, but has serious downsides. Anything at a moderate distance is indiscernable. This isn’t much of a factor most of the time since Stubbs fights in melee. However, when possessing someone who’s armed with a gun or when driving the tank it becomes annoying. I’m sure the graphics in the game are fantastic, but the previously mentioned blur effect makes it hard to appriciate them.

The only weapon Stubbs can always use is the swipe attack; all of the other ones have limited amounts. You replensh your ammo by eating brains, which is easy enough most of the time. But, in certain tight situations all you have is a crummy old swipe. I would have liked to have an additional melee attack that didn’t require replenishing.

The PC version of the game is almost exactly what one would play on a console. Therefore I don’t recomend trying to play this game with a keyboard and mouse unless you are used to playing 3rd-person action games that way. Instead, I suggest buying a Logitech dual action gamepad. It is exactly like a PS2 controller and has software that lets you configure the buttons any way you want.

Pros:

As I said, the PC version of the game is almost exactly what one would play on a console. If you like to play console games, but don’t want to shell out the cash for a console when you have a perfectly good computer, you’ll like Stubbs–provided of course you have an appropriate game pad (Logitech dual action, $20 at Best Buy, well worth the cost).

The soundtrack to the game is fantastic. If you’re a fan of rockabilly, golden oldies, or punk, you’ll be tempted to buy the soundtrack to this game which they are also selling. They have classic 50s tunes covered by modern bands with a slight punk edge.

The game is also very funny. Enemies whine about having their brains munched on. Some of the enemies are dressed up like a barber shop quartet and croon songs while they shoot ray guns. And one of the end bosses has to be defeated in a dance off. It’s sounds lame, but is really funny. Plus, if you are like me and can’t dance even in the digital world, you can skip it.

In what other game do you get to control a zombie? Fans of horror films will be entertained.