By Nick Durham

As one of the apparently few owners of a Wii-U on the FUCKING PLANET, any time I see a horror title on Nintendo's downloadable e-shop, I end up downloading it. The Letter, Molly Maggot, Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water...I fall for it every fucking time. And you know what? I end up hating myself almost immediately after I play it. Some shit never changes. Chasing Dead really isn't any different either in all honesty, although it winds up being better than all those aforementioned games (except for Fatal Frame) , but it still ends up being a bit of a mess.

Chasing Dead is a first person shooter where you play as a cyborg-ish dude named Jake, and you're tasked with mowing down shitloads of zombies. Along the way you get some help from an assistant named Luna (who is filmed in live action, which kind of makes this feel like a Sega CD game from fucking 1993) and there's a super confusing plot involving multiple earths and other ridiculous shit that really has no place in a zombie FPS, but I digress.

The game itself looks like...well, it's kind of hard to describe. There's moments where Chasing Dead looks pretty good...and then it gets choppier than shit due to its piss-poor frame rate. Sometimes during gameplay things appear to be going pretty smooth, and then if anything gets frantic, forget about it. The frame rate drops and the character models glitch, and it doesn't take long for the whole thing to become a mess. The shooting mechanics aren't too bad, but the controls are slightly delayed, so it doesn't really help matters at all.

While playing through Chasing Dead, I felt as if a decent chunk of this game just comes off as unfinished, and it turns out I wasn't totally wrong on that either. In addition to being released on the Wii-U, the game was also released on Steam for the PC, with it's original price of 25 bucks dropped to 10. This was due to those behind the game admitting that the finished product isn't exactly...well, finished. Apparently they're going to be tinkering with it more down the line, but honestly I can't imagine this game becoming any better. After all, you put as much lipstick on a turd as you want to, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still a turd.

So yeah, you'll definitely play worse games than Chasing Dead, but you'll play far, far better ones too. It's an unfinished and fairly uninteresting and uninspired zombie shooter, and you're better off spending your cash elsewhere. If you're a Wii-U owner looking for a new horror game to sink your teeth into...well, I guess you're still stuck with your copy of ZombiU from 2012.

Rating: 2/5


Posted by Alan Smithee

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