The Slaughtering Grounds is a FPS where you must survive a zombie onslaught for 15 minutes. You start off with a biker dude but can unlock more characters with unique weapons with cash you get from killing zombies. As soon as you start the game you are greeted with this small loop of music that is kind of catchy but will quickly get on your nerves as it is the only song in the game. And then you actually start the game and quickly wish you hadn’t. You will occasionally spawn in a very unfortunate position and quickly lose a good chunk of health to zombies while quickly moving away. Zombies don’t even attack, they will either stare at you or slap the air three feet away from you both of which cause damage somehow.
Well is gameplay fun you are probably thinking. Nope! The gunplay is extremely floaty and contact with zombies is very unsatisfying. Even worse is that you run out of ammo very quickly and have to go around the map searching for floating ammo crates for a pathetic amount of ammo to use and so the cycle continues indefinitely. All the while a horde of useless zombies slowly walk behind you posing no real threat. It is like a game of helping old people walk down the street as many zombies are also prone to stay in one place zoned out without a care in the world. There are also health packs and mines littered around the map. Mines are useless though since they are only capable of taking out a single zombie even in a large swarm.
Well what happens if you are somehow killed by the zombies? Absolutely nothing, you just respawn without your mines but still have the same amount of ammo. That means if you die without ammo you will have to walk all the way over to an ammo crate and repeat that vicious cycle of needing ammo. At this point you will probably pause the game to rethink what you are dong with you life but good luck with that! All that does is bring up a sign in front of your character and everything else functions the same as it does while not paused. You can still walk, enemies can still attack you but now you can’t shoot or walk sideways. Don’t worry though. Even if you are at 0% health you can still walk around.
At this point you are probably praying that the 15 minutes to survive are nearly over and you take a glance at the timer. Well good luck figuring out what amount of time is left since the timer is prone to glitch out and start showing random bits of numbers. So you had enough, go to the top of a building and jump. Hah, nice try buddy, there is no fall damage! So on you walk and walk leading a horde of zombies like if the pied piper found a rotten skin flute and start humming along to the haunting loop of the same song that has been playing nonstop all this time. Forget about the nonfunctional timer, forget about the sweet prospect of death that will never come and continue walking all over the map, around and around.
An unspecified amount of time later you remember you have a gun in your hands and are supposed to kill these old pe…err, zombies. So bam bam bam! You kill and run around collecting the money they drop for the purpose of buying a bigger clip to to kill them more efficiently. And then you remember why you stopped killing in the first place. You are essentially doing the same thing walking around the map but now you searching for ammo. The zombies are still slowly walking behind you posing no real threat and you realize that YOU are the monster. Wow, this game is deep, such a beautiful message…..and the timer runs out, teleporting you to a new map. In which case the only correct course of action is to Alt+F4 out of the game and delete system32 to stop the evil you just witnessed. Highly recommended if you hate yourself and need that extra push into the depths of madness.
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