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By Contributing Writer Jimmy Payne Rating: Average Zombie Revenge proves once again that Sega is great at flawlessly bringing arcade games to home systems. Now they just need to learn how to give the home versions more depth than their shallow arcade counterparts. The graphics in Zombie Revenge are pretty impressive. Just think House of the Dead meets Dynamite Cop, and you've got a good idea of what to expect. The main character models look nice, and they have lots of facial expressions. There are a wide variety of environments in the game, ranging from a typical zombie-infested town to a moving train. Perhaps most importantly of all, the zombies fly apart really well when you shoot them. That's very important in this kind of game. Zombie Revenge can be very fun when you're playing in co-op mode with a friend. There's no three-players or four-player mode, but a two-player mode is still a lot better than no multi-player mode at all. The two- player mode is a lot more strategic than single-player because you can plan out where each of you are going to be when a particular horde of zombies jumps out, or how you're going to work together to beat a boss. Unfortunately, the fun in Zombie Revenge disappears when your friends go home. When you're on your own and you don't have a friend to help you, the game is very dependent on whether or not you have a weapon. You'll do just fine if you have a weapon, but running out of ammo usually leads to death before too long. This is largely because the hand-to-hand combat in the game sucks. Every move seems to take five seconds to execute, and by that time one of the zombies has probably already blown you away with his shotgun. Since when did zombies know how to use guns, anyway? Somebody at Sega must have thought that they had a pretty good fighting engine on their hands, because they added a two-player versus mode. Here again, weapons are so much more effective than hand-to-hand combat that it's just a matter of who can grab a weapon first. There's not much skill or strategy involved in running to a corner, picking up a shotgun, and firing at your opponent. It would make sense for more enemies to be released in the game if more than one player is in the game. This way it's always balanced no matter how many people are playing. For some reason, the amount of zombies released in this game is always the same no matter how many people are playing. As a result, the two-player mode is easier than it should be, and the single-player mode is harder than it should be on the higher difficulty settings. The voice acting in Zombie Revenge is terrible, and not in a good way like Resident Evil. For one thing, the in-game announcer pronounces bullets like "boollets," and this gets very annoying when it's repeated on a constant basis. The characters also make themselves seem like easily- confused robots with some of the dialogue. At one point in the game, after you've already killed plenty of zombies, the female character asks, "Is that a zombie?" Of course it's a zombie! What else could it possibly be? Scott Hall on another "partying" binge? Zombie Revenge is almost completely worthless as a single-player game. It's decent fun if you've got time to kill with a friend, but there are plenty of better multi-player games out there. Send your thoughts on this review to jimmy@mastergamer.com
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