The Haunted Hoard: SG/ZH: School Girl/Zombie Hunter (PS4)

Much like how there are exploitation films that specifically aim to appeal to audience with their flagrant embraces of violence and adult content, there are video games that aim to capture that very same grindhouse appeal. Juxtaposing attractive young woman with over the top blood and gore is the main idea of the Onechanbara series where the heroine is a bikini-clad cowgirl who slices her way through scores of zombies, but while SG/ZH: School Girl/Zombie Hunter is a spinoff of this franchise, it never comes outright and identifies the connection for those unfamiliar with Onechanbara. In fact, some of its story elements are just borrowed without providing important details on them, but what School Girl/Zombie Hunter mainly does is take a look at five high school girls as they need to survive their school being overrun with zombies with the same focus on cuteness and creepiness being the two halves of this game’s tone.

One big issue with how School Girl/Zombie Hunter tells its story is the fact it throws you in so quickly without establishing much of anything. The school the five girls are attending seems to teach not only combat but proper firearm use, and when the zombies do start appearing, the girls are all acknowledged as excellent in their wide range of skills perfect for such a situation. We do at least get some idea on where the zombies are coming from even if it doesn’t divulge the full details of how the outbreak works, but the bigger focus is on the main characters as their character flaws all emerge during the zombie invasion. While the girls await rescue and struggle to survive, the personal trials involve things like the soft-spoken Risa needing to overcome her timidity and cowardice to protect her friends, the airheaded Mayaya has to overcome her lack of empathy, serious and focused Enami struggles to break out of her all business mindset, and the idol Rei needs to be willing to open up to others rather than protect her cultivated image. All of these arcs are fairly basic but at least the girls are given something that draws them together as friends as they learn from their interactions, with the main girl Sayuri defined more by her unflinching trust and confidence that helps the other girls to start to look inwards.

While the story scenes are plentiful and feature their original Japanese voice acting with subtitles, the basic ideas covered means you won’t really be playing this game for the girl’s development. Mostly they’re meant to be a mixed group of drastically different personalities so they play off each other as they face off with zombies, but sadly the talking while they’re fighting isn’t subtitled. Part of this is likely because they react to the current situation and you can actually fight off the hordes with the full group of five at times, but the constant need to cry out when hit or speak when attacking can lead to some obnoxious moments. In particular, the penultimate mission of the story has the five girls fight five other girls who all feature the same need to vocalize, and coupled with the gunshots and explosive weapons going off, it might be one of the loudest moments I’ve experienced in a video game that wasn’t a glitch or error. The cacophonous din of all the girls babbling and screaming at once is a mostly isolated incident, and having the other ladies along to help with the zombie hunting does make the missions they’re involved in go faster, which is good because the actual combat is pretty repetitive and far too straightforward.

The weapons you can use to fight off the zombies all have the expected roles for their weapon types. A shotgun can deal heavy damage at close range, a sniper rifle lets you eliminate zombies from afar, and the submachine guns and assault rifles let you fill a foe with lead rather quickly. The handgun however feels completely pointless because, while each girl has a gun that’s essentially designated as their firearm of choice, you can equip five weapons to each girl and overlap is allowed. Whipping out your pistol always feels like an inferior option and ammo isn’t a concern since it’s infinite with the limitation being the reload speed. The rocket launcher you can get later can obliterate a lot of the problem foes too like the few boss fights you run into, and sadly a lot of the boss fights are just about avoiding their clearly telegraphed attacks and firing when it is safe to do so. What’s strange though is the game is packed full of guns to collect from the dead bodies of zombies, these coming in different strengths and featuring differing stats. The unusual part of this is how frivolous the system seems, the game giving you plenty of repeats or guns that are marginally different when it feels like the only two stats you need to worry about are the power of a shot and the clip size to avoid reloading downtime. The weapons within a gun style all feel basically the same to use so these weapon pickups often prevent actually helpful items from spawning like grenades or health refills. Leveling up is also tacked on to possibly encourage playing as different girls when you have a choice so they keep up with the pack, but it just feels like it can lead to slower gameplay as a weaker girl takes longer to do the same things the others wouldn’t struggle with.

The guns do their jobs sufficiently though so most of the issues can be blamed on unnecessary feature bloat, but it is the zombies who feel like they needed to carry the gameplay and end up failing it. Single zombies are often easy to kill but their numbers are what makes them dangerous as some can slip through while you deal with others, or at least that’s the theoretical scenario. Each girl has a melee attack that can force nearby zombies away with ease, and unless the game uses its forcefields that bar progress until you kill the nearby zombies, some levels you can just run through and kick the pesky normal zombies aside on your way. To make these zombies an actual challenge some of them can get a burst of energy and rush towards you, and others are made orange or green to indicate that they’ll detonate into fire or poison when killed. Regular zombie combat is mostly a cakewalk still, but there are some tougher or unique zombie types. Some crawl on the ceiling and lower abnormally long necks to whip at you with, and the big zombies come with different weapons that deal heavy damage if they get close. The ceiling zombies aren’t much of a change since aiming upwards in this third person shooter is simple, but the big guys can at least mess you up if you let yourself get boxed in or are meant to be protecting something and multiple appear at once. They are also the ones immune to your melee attacks so levels where you’d otherwise kick your way through you also need to briefly but usually quite easily take out any big guys amongst the zombie groupings.

One issue with the zombie combat though is the means by which new enemies appear. Zombies can just appear anywhere they please as the game seems to spawn them in relation to your position based on the fact zombies can appear on inaccessible roofs and other areas where they’ll be unable to hurt you. However, they can also appear right where you’re standing which is an unfair bit of danger and doesn’t make them a greater threat for it. You’re more likely to be taking damage from an explosive baddie appearing right next to you than any smart enemy placement, so actually failing a mission is all the more frustrating since it likely was a product of the game’s lack of intelligent enemy placement. If enemies do appear around you suddenly or big guys have managed to make a zombie swarm actually dangerous, you do have some tricks up your sleeve that play into the game’s attempts to rope in sex appeal on top of violent action. The zombies are drawn to women’s clothing, so in a pinch, whichever girl you happen to be playing as can rip off her uniform and use it as bait. This actually plays into the clothing damage system where taking hits tears up your clothes, because if the zombies ruin your clothes you can’t use it as bait for that level. However, you can set up an underwear trap provided the girl has worn it for a long enough period of real time, and while this is definitely a feature meant to excite people looking for the lewder side of this horror game, it at least ties into the idea that maybe the clothes are drawing zombie attention because it carries the scent of living people. While the game doesn’t actually show any full frontal nudity, you do have to shower to acquire an underwear trap so there is gratuitous adult content as you might expect from a zombie hunting game that gives equal billing in its title to the school girl element.

Mission structure in School Girl/Zombie Hunter is unfortunately rather restricted in that the school the whole game takes place in quickly becomes old and unexciting. The familiar locations do mean you can get around it easily, but with the low variety in the zombie types and now the locations being repeated again and again, the adventure feels like its trying to squeeze too much playtime out of too little meaningful content. There are areas like a gymnasium and a baseball field, but mostly you’ll be moving through hallways to enter basic classrooms to fight zombies and pick up key items. There is a secret underground facility at least that breaks up the monotony of the school environment, but for the most part the areas are rehashed again and again but with spots locked off by blue forcefields if they’re not part of the mission. The optional side missions probably do a better job of diversifying their goals than the main game, using those forcefields to make the school more maze-like, locking you into sniping only, or otherwise altering the game world with a little less regard for making sense narratively. In fact, almost all of these use the premise that a supply drop is waiting for you after you complete the goal, the items within sometimes tying in with the character you chose so you can get to know their life and interests a little better. They’re not a huge step up in gameplay sadly, but they do a better job of breaking up the monotonous objective design than the main story so playing them as you unlock them can at least inject a little more life into this less than thrilling zombie hunting experience.

THE VERDICT: SG/ZH: School Girl/Zombie Hunter delivers on the promise its title makes but doesn’t put in the effort to make either half of it very interesting. The five main girls at least have a little personality and develop a little during the adventure but they are fairly cookie-cutter characters who are designed to provide eye candy first and foremost. The guns they wield are generic, locations repeat too often, and the zombie variety isn’t too strong either. What difficulty there is when you can’t just ignore the combat and push your way to the objective mostly emerges from the awful enemy spawning that can place meaty foes or explosive baddies on top of you. The game ends up in a situation where a lot of its systems are better off ignored as best you can since they only drag things out instead of improving how you engage with the action.

And so, I give SG/ZH: School Girl/Zombie Hunter for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. If zombies were placed deliberately instead of just spawning near your current position then the game could at least try to craft some encounters that test your abilities. In fact, the optional sniping mission do just that and include some of the more interesting moments of gameplay because you need to choose your targets so no one slips through to deal damage. School Girl/Zombie Hunter just feels like it has a bunch of systems lying around with little thought put into how they should work together, the game relying on the school girls to keep your interest either with some basic but decent enough personalities or the fact they can yank off their uniforms with a button press. Wading through so much tedium for such things is certainly not worth the effort though, and the online multiplayer requires plenty of time spent leveling up and getting the gear to be an effective cooperative partner so it just adds more time spent doing unimaginative and sometimes frustrating missions if you wish to play this with a friend. The guns and melee attacks at least mean you can often get through the more basic action with ease and the bosses aren’t very challenging roadblocks either, but its hard to find anything that stands out as a reason to actually play this title over games that could either offer more titillation or higher quality zombie slaying.

SG/ZH: School Girl/Zombie Hunter fits into the idea of an exploitation game fairly well, because just like the films that relied on blood and babes, it doesn’t have a lot going on beyond that. Even then, the babes and blood here aren’t presented in an interesting enough way to keep you on board. Some ideas like giving the girls small character arcs or the ideas behind optional missions show potential, but it seems, for the most part, the game felt like it could sit back and rely on its mix of cute and creepy to skirt by. Unlike a movie though, playing School Girl/Zombie Hunter requires active participation, and its hard to care about how the ladies look while fighting zombies if the fighting itself is lifeless and uninspired.