Review: Deadly 30

Meridian4 has this week announced and released their new survival shooter, Deadly 30.

In this game, the player takes on the role of a zombie apocalypse survivor with limited equipment. Each day the character can use the daylight to explore the surrounding regions for metal and other survivors, then each night is spent defending the home base—if you make it back in time—where the goal is to defend the power generator.

The cornfield isn't even safe in the daylight. The only safe place is the dark forest, in which the main base sits fully protected during the day.

The nights are rough, but the base has upgradeable fences and—eventually—turrets, which requires metal collected during the day to keep them maintained. That metal is also used to craft the better weapons required to keep ahead of the ever-more-dangerous zombie horde.

The crafting interface, where the player can turn scrap metal into guns, ammo, healthpack, turrets, and other upgrades. Note that the rifles are greyed out. This is because the character who uses that weapon is not currently in the party.

The mechanics of the game are that of a simple 2D shooter—move with the keyboard, aim and fire with the mouse—which has been one of my favorite gameplay mechanics since the original Blackthorn game back in the 90’s.
Most everything else about the game is a bit juvenile and unhindered, however. The story is a standard fare—”zombie attacks”—with zombies that seem just like any other standard collection of undead creepies, mostly modeled after the zombies of Left 4 Dead.

After a night of combat, the ground is littered with zombie corpses.

Frequently the game becomes far too difficult, and not for the right reasons. Some of the zombie are simply annoying rather than challenging. For example, the exploding zombie type can cause the player’s screen to become ‘slimed’ in such away that it is impossible to see anything that is going on—even the character’s health bars are obscured. One instance of this in the middle of frenetic combat almost invariably leads to a complete loss of all party members—and thus loss of progress back to the previous morning—because it’s literally impossible to see what’s going on, and the characters get completely overwhelmed. There is no way to stop the effect, and no way to  run or hide.

Then there are the super tough guys, which literally require minutes of sustained fire to kill, tearing down base defenses in the meantime. Honestly, I would have had a lot more fun with the late-game if all the zombies had been roughly the same, and there had just been more of them each night.

The player's characters can move and shoot through the base barricades, but the zombies have to stop and bash at them.

The illustrations and animations seem on par with what one finds in the Flash games on the various free Flash game sites, with voice acting and dialog writing at that same level—where everything seems to be written for a 13 year old. The characters are stereotyped, and nearly offensively depicted. The female German soldier for example seems to be a Nazi-but-not-really-a-Nazi mentality, making frequent references to the superiority of Aryans and such, while, incongruously, also wielding a frying pan as her melee weapon rather than the knives the men get… presumably because she’s the only woman, and she belongs in a kitchen?  The addition, on top of that, of frequent toilet humor just makes the game feel like it was designed to get upvotes on Newgrounds, rather than sell to a serious gaming market. The whole game, in fact, put me in mind of a casual Flash game—one of the better ones perhaps, but still not at the production value, or depth, I expect from most full release Indie games.

There isn’t anything innovative or new here, and one wouldn’t play it for the story, but the clear, classic mechanics still give a fun diversion for a few hours at least, and with a $5 price tag, it’s tough to go wrong.

Deadly 30 is available now for Windows for $4.95.