How do you make a zombie survival game original? It's tough coming after the adapting survival-horror-now-essentially-shooter Resident Evil series or the action-comedy Dead Rising, but Ubisoft enters the fray with their WiiU game, ZombiU. The title's a classic Nintendo trick of bridging the game to the console, which brings up other awkward future ideas (Assassins CreedU? Watch DogsU?).
The game starts in London and you've barely survived the initial zombie outbreak. But the innovation starts up here, as Kotaku points out. Every time you play, you're a new character.When you're engaging on missions, if you die, you immedately spawn as a new character with the high chance of running into your previous character, who'll still have all the gear and items you died with. There's no word on what the plot is, or even if there is a centralized plot aside from going on missions and surviving until the inevitable zombie grabs you.
From Joystiq:
"Those zombies representing your shortcomings continue to stalk around the area you died, and you can find them and kill them, thus erasing the evidence of your inability to survive the zombie apocalypse and getting the items back that were left on the body. It's kind of like going back for your body in a roguelike game, except your body is also going after you."
And if your friends in the Miiverse die, their zombies complete with gamertag will pop up in the world. Gameplay wise, it seems to have the most innovative use of the WiiU controller yet, making it usable for your inventory, which causes your character to physically check his backpack; use it as a sonar to detect movement, a scope for snipers, a hacking mini-game and even a way to do a melee finisher. Meanwhile in multiplatyer, Venture Beat found one of the modes, a unique take on Capture the Flage,where one is a survivor and the other places up to ten zombies on the map that range from zombies that focus on the flag to blockers against the survivor.
ZombiU will likely launch with the WiiU later this year, but the game has caused rumors that it could show up on 360 and PS3 as well.