Last week Sony delivered unto us Dead Nation, the latest entry in the increasingly swamped “Kill a crapload of zombies” market. When we talk about the popularity of zombie games (and movies, TV shows, and probably Halloween prosthetics), there’s a joke in there somewhere about a spreading infection, but I’ll save you a groan and not make it.
Dead Nation takes the form of a top-down shoot-‘em-up, as appears to be the pattern for a number of recent small digital releases. You’ll choose a male or female character to fight through the zombie ravaged city in an effort to retrieve the apparently important body of Patient Zero and hopefully formulate a cure. There’s a story to be had here, though the product may have been better off without it. Rarely would I champion the cause for less narrative, but this story is a strange half-measure that seems to exist only to showcase some (admittedly sharp) artwork. Told through brief interludes between missions, it describes the journey of your character through the zombie wasteland in such thin detail that it may as well not bother at all. Your character has lines, but they exist only to tell you what your objective is, not because you’re actually a person with thoughts—and since the objective is always the same (get from point A to point B), this is entirely superfluous.