You know a trend is getting out of hand when even the complaints about it start to grate on the nerves; that said, I’m going to take it easy on the zombie-game genre in this brief look at Sega’s upcoming addition to the Yakuza series, Dead Souls. It’s difficult to ignore the recent plague of zombie games, so there’s no point in stating the obvious with empty complaints. Instead, why don’t we attempt to figure out just what’s inspiring all of them?
Outside of the general public’s fascination with reanimated flesh, filling a game with undead foes serves as a promising prospect for developers; after all, who needs to program complex A.I. when you can give all of your game’s enemies the intelligence of a grunt from Doom? It also helps that zombie tropes are so well-known (and expected) that developers don’t need to exert much creativity. You’ve got some undead humans, maybe a few mutations sprinkled in here and there, and a cast of characters looking to get from point A to point B without getting devoured. Hell, it even gives your protagonists the chance to murder thousands and come out at the end with clean hands, unlike Uncharted’s Nathan Drake.
