Dead Nation

Lead Salad and I were looking for a new coop game. Something specifically coop that we would both love.

After accidentally running across gameplay footage of Dead Nation for PSN I knew that we had our game. After looking at it....Salad agreed.

Dead Nation has been out for several months and largely went ignored by me because I figured it was yet another quick cash in to the zombie genre, but boy was I wrong.

It's a top down dual joystick shooter....and it's absolutely punishing at times.

Take Left 4 Dead, but throw in a ton more zombies with a darker setting and much more difficult odds with a birds eye view and you have Dead Nation.

Like:

Difficulty: We are playing on "Normal" and it's running us through the paces. There are still 2 difficulties above this and I can only imagine how bad those are. It's pretty astounding just how fast things can go bad. We try to run in a pack and it takes literally about 2 seconds to be torn apart and fighting for ourselves.

Tons of Zombies: Seriously, this games throws easily over 50 zombies at you at a time and it keeps you on the edge of your seat....at all times.

Constant Action and Tension: There's very very little down time. In Left 4 Dead (which I love and am not bashing) there's many areas that are barely zombie filled at all, but in Dead Nation you're almost always fighting.

Environments and Zombies: As a top down shooter you wouldn't expect much from the graphics department, but they really did a good job making the game look really good for what it is.

Zombie Variation: There are a lot of different types of zombies and almost all different variations have their own set of animations and moves. Up against the way overused skins of Left 4 Dead it's pretty impressive.

Weapons: I like that the game pretty much forces you to buy the fancy guns to survive. You can use the standard rifle, smg and shotgun, but there's no way you're gonna survive the later levels. Salad and I have split responsibilities of weapons. I use the SMG and Bladezooka (you read that right) and Salad uses the Shotgun and Grenade Launcher. Also, all the weapons are upgradeable which gives the game an RPG feel that I dig. Again, you have to upgrade these weapons to succeed.

Length: There are 10 chapters and we have only finished 5 so far so and each mission takes around 30 minutes give or take a few minutes. There's a lot of meat on this game and the replayability on harder difficulties will be high.

Dislike:

Too Dark: Many times you'll get hit by zombies you couldn't even see because the environments can be too dark.

Controls: While they do work really well with R3 doing reload so you don't have to take your thumbs off of the stick they suck at the worst times. Mainly because you rely so heavily on your big guns when the shit hits the fan, but you get overwhelmed so fast (which is very often) you can't take your left thumb off the stick to switch to a better weapon with the D-Pad because you'll get destroyed.

Bottom Line:

I really enjoy this game and I know Salad does too. It absolutely boils down coop to it's most essential elements of dedication to each other and having to work together to survive.

It has a high level of polish and great design and something that any zombie fan should buy immediately.