When ZombiU shed its Wii U exclusivity and the awkwardly tacked-on vowel that identified it as such so it could be remastered for PC, PS4 and Xbox One as Zombi, I was like a ghoul at an all-you-can-eat brain buffet. It had been on the short list of Wii U exclusives that I’ve wanted to play for three years — alongside Bayonetta 2 and the still-fresh Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water — so it felt good being able to scratch it off that list.
It didn’t take long for that warm feeling to be replaced by frustration.
Zombi isn’t a remaster, it’s a port. I hoped it would be comparable to what Resident Evil HD was to the Resident Evil GameCube remake, but what we got was more like Resident Evil 4 for Xbox 360 vs. Resident Evil 4 for PC. In other words, it was moderately disappointing.
It’s still a lovely game crammed with smart ideas that go a long way in separating it from the horde of zombie games that continues to grow each month, and despite a disappointing “next-gen” debut, it may still have some life left yet behind those cold, dead eyes.
This modicum of hope comes from the recent announcement that Zombi will be getting a retail release on January 21 in Europe. It doesn’t sound like much, but one could see this as a sign that Ubisoft is testing the game’s sequel potential by watching how it performs as a retail product. And if that doesn’t happen, we may still get something out of it should it perform well enough to warrant retail releases in other territories, such as ‘MERICA.
