John the Zombie is an Open World game in where we play as a scientist who became undead after trying to resurrect his cat. He actually succeeds, but as fate would have it that same cat scratches him and kicks off his entire quest to become human once more. We start off our adventure in the store of a man named Dree, who immediately gives us a mission and informs us that in order to regain some of our basic human functions such as sprinting, you must eat the brains of the living. John has no qualms with this and will ruthlessly maul then devour any of the inhabitants roaming the city known as Johnwood.
This all sounds like great fun but its faults start to become apparent immediately. For one, while you do have a button to punch it phases through NPCs and is only used to smash crates. To kill someone you simply press E while near them to trigger a death cutscene that goes on for far too long, then that’s that. Aside from eating people to learn some skills, you also have a stamina meter that quickly depletes and can only be refilled by a healthy serving of brains. If the stamina bar fully depletes then you will become incredibly slow for a set amount of time before getting back to normal. It’s a choice between putting up with watching a ton of long-winded NPC death cutscenes or occasionally moving at a snail’s pace, neither is fun.
Our zombie protagonist can not jump which severely hampers any fun you may have had when navigating or watching the physics engine at work. You can’t punch random people, the vomiting power you have is completely busted and doesn’t work nine times out of ten, and there isn’t anything to keep you entertained while making a b-line to your next task. Quests have some dialogue before and after completing them and the humor is pretty solid. This too is ruined by the frustration that your input to move on to the next sentence is ignored most of the time, causing you to spam the mouse’s left click and in turn, accidentally skip random chunks of the conversation. It will also completely ignore your controller input so make sure to have your mouse handy whenever dialogue occurs.
The real kicker here is the objectives of the quests themselves. They are nothing but fetch quests tasking you with collecting multiple of a random object scattered throughout the map, not to mention the added bonus that you need to grind for materials. Your main three are wood, rocks, and finally cash, all which are found lying around in the world. Wood and rocks are used to build certain mission objectives while cash is used to purchase the equipment needed to do so. You’ll also need the necessary skills that can be gained by eating enough brains containing that knowledge. It is an interesting mechanic in concept, but it ultimately results in a whole lot of boring busy work and doesn’t do much to alleviate the fact that most of the time you’ve simply traveled across the city to press E on an object.
Speaking of traveling, there are quite a bit of options to get around, granted you have the skill needed. You can ride bicycles, cars, trucks, and even horses to get where you need to go much faster. Each one of these forms of transport comes with their own downsides, however. Bicycles have this bizarre need to cut to white and show a small cutscene every time you use it or get off, making it one of the most annoying. You can’t jump while on one either so there is no real fun to be had and is objectively worse than cars. Whatever other form of vehicle you get into is done so dynamically and without that annoying white screen transition thankfully. Cars are the most enjoyable to use as you can run down pedestrians, though it shares an odd flaw with the bike in which your map icon changes into something that lacks an arrow. That makes it impossible to know which way you are facing and difficult to navigate around the place if you don’t have it memorized.
Finally, you have horses. Riding these allows you to retain your map arrow so it is the most ideal way to get around the place, but to little surprise, this too suffers from a flaw. Often times while trying to get off of your horse the thing will simply start spinning around confused and you will have to mash the heck out of that E key for any chance of dismounting in the near future if you are lucky. Seriously, the amount of times you have to press E or the action button on your controller is unreal. You press it every 30 seconds to maul someone via cutscene, to pick up random materials you will need, and to complete most any missions.
It is a shame as the world is a pretty neat place, it just lacks anything worthwhile to do or any way to make your own fun. You can’t jump nor can you assault random people with your useless punching button, you can’t hijack cars instead one must go to their spawn points, and to top that off you have to worry about your unnecessary stamina meter. All you’ll be doing is going through quests that are designed to waste your time in some of the least enjoyable ways possible. The one that took the cake for me had to have been the mission that requires you to dig up a graveyard in search of an item. There was an absurd amount to search, with each requiring a timing based mini-game to successfully dig up. An interesting aspect of progressing through the story is that the city slightly changes for a time. They can introduce zombie hunters who are no different than anyone else and are defeated by pressing E or citizens set up indestructible barricades around the city.
John will not be the only zombie in town for long. The horde of the undead gradually grows and hunts down the humans. You are no human so what it means is that you have to compete with them in order to either regain your stamina or try to get to the guy that knows how to play basketball before they do. It is not all too difficult to do. Humans in this game really want you to chomp into their flesh as the AI immediately chases after you, lands a single hit then flees in terror for some reason. So the thrill of hunting (aka pressing E) is also taken from you since as soon as a human sees you, they come directly to you like moths to a flame. There is just so much wrong with John the Zombie in both its technical and design wise aspects. It is not an Early Access title and as of this review is sold for ten US dollars. I really can not recommend this title in any way.
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