Land of the Dead : Road to Fiddler's Green

Reviewed by Matt Steele
February 8, 2006

Developer: Groove Games Publisher: Atari Platform(s): PC, XBOX Number of Players: up to 8 (multiplayer) Website: Click Here ESRB Rating: M for Mature Review Rating: 1.0 out of 10

Let me start off by saying that I have nothing against mindless shooting games. Games like Doom, Quake, and Serious Sam have proven that when done right, the simple point and shoot formula can be fun and rewarding. Not only can simple shooting games be fun and rewarding, but they possess mystical healing powers as well. There is no better stress reliever than entering a room full of bad guys armed with a triple rocket launcher and smearing the walls with them. Need to wind down before writing a term paper? Boot up Quake 4 and cap some Strogg in the face with the nail gun. Need to calm the nerves before a presentation? Load up Doom 3 and liquefy some Hellspawn with some burning hot plasma. But no matter how stressed you are, or how desperate your need is to blast some digital foes, do not load up Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green. Ever. Just don't do it. It's that bad .

Screenshot.

The premise for Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green is this: You're a farmer, and you shoot zombies. That's it. The brief cut-scene in the beginning of the game sets the stage on the farm, where you were quietly minding your own business one evening when zombies just started invading your farm and trying to eat you. The story is incredibly complex, but if you can read at a second grade level then you should have no problem following its many surprising twists and turns.

If you haven't already guessed, gameplay in Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green isn't exactly rocket science. It mostly consists of running, shooting zombies, running, shooting more zombies, reloading, shooting more zombies, etc… It would be one thing if the zombies were intelligent, agile foes with several scripted behaviors, but the sad truth is they display the artificial intelligence level of the average toaster. They just limp towards you with their arms out in true zombie fashion, just asking to be blown away without much of a fight. The game would be ridiculously easy if you didn't run out of ammo every ten seconds. When this happens the player is forced to resort to bludgeoning the zombies to death with various tools that are found lying around, such as a hammer or a shovel. This isn't as satisfying as it sounds, as the blunt force objects aren't nearly as powerful as you would think. It also takes far too long to wind up a hit, and the resulting animations are just plain weak. The strong attack from the shovel looks like one is giving the zombie a firm poke—a fact made even more hilarious by the resulting over exaggerated death animation. And the zombies do actually dish out quite a wallop when they get up close enough to swipe, which can be frustrating when your melee weapon feels more like a pillow than anything substantive. With a little common sense anyone can figure out the trick to defeating zombies with even the weakest of shovels: hit, back away, hit, back away, and so forth.

The developers tried to breathe some life into this title by adding a few goodies such as mountable turrets and accurate damage models on enemies, but these just cause more frustration (or perhaps comedy) in the end. The damage model is especially ‘glitchy'. I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I shot a zombie in the arm only to have his head miraculously explode, or when I shot a zombie in the shin only to see his left arm go flying off. To their credit, the developers did have a few other good ideas. There is one level near the beginning of the game that involves blindly navigating through a cornfield. This borderline frustrating situation evoked emotions that actually resembled fear and anxiety, and for a second I was tricked into thinking I was playing a good game. I came to my senses when the zombies gave away their positions by moaning and shuffling their feet as they oh so un-scarily limped towards me through the corn.

One has a particularly miserable game at hand when the fundamental game play mechanic isn't even fun. Here, the mechanic is first-person shooting, and the developers have somehow managed to suck the fun clean out of one of the most tried and true formulas. Guns have a slow rate of fire and are generally sluggish, reloading is painfully slow and awkward, and the guns don't even sound right. This game is supposedly based on the movie Land of the Dead , but if the movie is in any way reminiscent of the game then there is no way in hell I'm going to watch it. My suspicion is that linking the two is a ploy to sell more copies, but I can't blame them. They need all the help they can get to sell this dismal game.

If I could give it a “Super Low” or an “Uber-Low” I would. Multiplayer is as laughable as the main game. I don't see any replay value, in fact, I fail to see a reason to play it at all.