Undead Empire is the latest in the popular twin stick shooter genre on Xbox Indie Games.
The games story mode lives up to its name. Starting the game presents you with a fairly well written introduction which explains how a coach crashes in Nebraska in the near future. There are six survivors including a police officer, a soldier and a schoolgirl which become the playable characters in the game. They soon find a mansion and its occupier Dr Hubert van Scythe and the events of the story unfold. I won’t spoil the story any further but it is safe to say it involves the undead!
The campaign plays in a wave format, a number of the undead will raise from the ground and you must kill them all to go ahead to the next. The story continues between the waves with dialogue from Dr. van Scythe which was good to read, I often find in games of this genre that the story is non important after the intro so having it continue throughout the game helps work towards a goal.
The six characters have their own perks, for example the businessman earns you more cash than others when collected and the soldier has a higher ammunition capacity. A decent choice of weapons are available to buy and include the traditional pistol, assault, shotgun and flame throwers through to more wacky lightning guns which electrocute your foes. Turrets can also be purchased to give you some help, they are relatively cheap to buy but they will use all of your limited ammunition supply. In between each wave you can visit Leroy’s Store where you can buy new and upgrade existing weapons as well as resupply your health and ammo.
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The waves of enemies are fairly varied, you start with the traditional zombies and in later levels birds and Left For Dead looking Boomer’s amongst others will start to appear. Each have different strengths and weaknesses so it pays to have a good variety of guns at hand. Bosses can also be encountered every ten or so waves. You do feel at times very overwhelmed by the number of enemies chasing after you, especially considering ammunition is in short supply, every bullet counts or you could find yourself against 100 enemies with nothing but a pistol!
The campaign is fun to play in single player but games are always better with a few friends. Undead Empire supports up to four players over Xbox LIVE to play cooperatively in the campaign. There unfortunately some issues with multiplayer, particularly in four player mode, which the developer is currently fixing, at the time of writing this review (April 28th) there should be a patch available very soon.
The second mode is a Survival mode which arms you with an assault rifle with infinite bullets to kill an infinite number of spawning enemies. Seems fair? Well it isn’t! The enemies initially start off few in number and quickly start appearing at a very overwhelming rate. You only have a minimal amount of energy so just one touch of an enemy will instantly kill you and it is game over! This is an intentionally difficult mode to play but after a few games you will start to learn patterns of keeping the undead away and improve on your previous score.
Graphically the game is average with retro looking graphics throughout the game. There is nothing wrong with them as such, they work well enough with the genre and I experienced no slow down when there were over a hundred enemies on screen. The sound effects do the job but the quality could be improved to give some more meaty sounding gunfire. Online leaderboards are supported and there are some very competitive scores which I have no chance of beating, they must be professional zombie killers! 🙂
Undead Empire costs 80 :MSPoints: which is great value for money. The two single player modes are great fun to play and are worth the asking fee alone. While the multiplayer mode does have some issues these are being worked on by the developer so once the patch is out the mode should be great fun to play properly. If you are a fan of the twin stick genre or enjoy killing the undead with a variety of weapons I suggest you head over to the Xbox Marketplace and buy it now!
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