The Haunted Hoard: Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip (Xbox One)

In 2009 the horror comedy film Zombieland came out, its fun twist on a zombie apocalypse was immediately identified as something that could have potential as a larger franchise. Talks turned to a sequel and spin-offs, but it looked like the movie was just going to be a one-and-done for a while, but a possible television series showed the franchise had a bit of life before it was cancelled mostly due to backlash against not using the same cast of four characters the original movie featured. In 2019 though there would be the true revival, a movie sequel that not only brought back the old cast but did so despite actress Abigail Breslin going from a small girl to a grown woman in the interim. However, the film opens with the four characters bearing the name of their home towns sitting in the White House, a far jump from the amusement park in California they were last seen in. Coming out a few days before the film, Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip aims to tell how they crossed the United States, and while only Abigail Breslin is on board here to voice her character of Little Rock, the game does put in the work trying to capture the tone and dynamics of the two movies.

 

The self-styled cowboy Tallahassee, the sarcastic Witchita, the nerdy Columbus, and the effervescent Little Rock find themselves back at the Pacific Playland amusement park almost ten years after the events of the original Zombieland, the group using Columbus’s zombie survival rules and observations to carve out a life for themselves in relative comfort despite the ongoing societal apocalypse. While they still have to deal with the living dead, their continued search for supplies eventually twists as the more ridiculous members of the group, Tallahasse and Little Rock, get it in their head they should go to Washington D.C., the group setting off on a road trip the pair pretend is some sort of cross country political campaign. With very few living people to find along the way it is mostly a fantasy the two indulge in for some fun, but between doing actually important things for survival, you will get plenty of amusing interactions between the main cast that ensure this game is worthy of properly being called a comedy. The character dynamics in this co-op top-down shooter make the moments the zombie killing carnage takes a break to allow for some talking the actual highlights, the road trip premise also allowing them to make fun of a few familiar U.S. cities and states even if the places they end up exploring in those locations are sometimes something simple like a stretch of road or a supermarket rather than somewhere recognizable.

Most levels during your road trip will lay out a small set of goals to complete that guide you through the areas filled with angry undead, a pretty vital part of helping the game keep itself from being all too simple. This twin stick shooter has you moving with one control stick and pointing the other where you want to shoot and the zombie variation isn’t so broad that you often feel pressured while blasting your way through their ranks. Whether on your own or with up to three other players (although only offline since no online multiplayer exists for this game), Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip isn’t usually going to be putting up the strongest fight. Walking backwards and firing on a group of zombies is often a successful tactic and even disrupts a few foes who could have been threatening otherwise. The so-called Ninja zombie type is a fancily named variant that can actually sprint towards you at high speeds, but they need to come to a stop to try and strike you, meaning backing away from them avoids that hit and invalidates some of the advantage that speed gives them. Zombies do come in high numbers and sometimes you’ll face them in a tight space so you can get too surrounded for your backpedaling counter to work though, and other enemy types do actually have a more consistent chance of hurting you. A female zombie type sprays projectile vomit that requires you to weave some instead of just backpedal and a fat zombie variant detonates once they’re close enough or they’ve sustained too much damage meaning you have to clear that area in a hurry. Some other zombie types like particularly tough or sturdy ones don’t really require much more attention though, especially once you start upgrading your characters based on the points you earn once a level is cleared. At least a few other zombie types like the knife-throwing clowns means there are moments where you feel a bit pressured despite the generally low level of challenge.

 

The sometimes mindless thrill of clearing out the horde does make it a decent timewaster with friends, but the earlier mentioned goals give it some much needed direction. Sometimes you’ll need to activate a device or machine, your character forced to stand in place and not fire any guns until you’ve fully done so and thus actually holding some ground becomes an issue you have to work around. Some stages ask you to protect a little old lady who is walking around the streets with little worry for her own safety, there being a nice touch in that she recovers health gradually but it might be a little unnecessary since it’s still a fairly easy mission despite the undead now being focused on a target who doesn’t know the benefits of walking in reverse. Some stages introduce zombie spawners like the SWAT vans with their riot-shield brandishing baddies who are tougher to take down, the zombie spawners giving you a focus for your attacks now but requiring you to push into crowded areas often to ensure you’re doing decent damage to them. The shake-ups aren’t strong enough to really push it into excellence, but it does keep the action just interesting enough most of the time, especially with the way the weapon system factors into things.

 

Your pistol in Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip is weak, fires ten shots before it need to reload, but has infinite ammo, meaning you’re never in a complete bind but there’s no way you’ll repel a zombie horde with it alone. Instead, characters will need to scavenge stronger options from the areas they’re exploring, this adding more life to the action than the zombie type variation. Popping open a car trunk or rooting around in a box will provide you with a weapon with limited uses, the range and strength of these varying and the offerings granted to you in certain situations helping to keep most battles from becoming complete cake walks. The game might provide a melee weapon like a katana or axe that will kill most basic zombies when they’re hit, but having to have zombies close by to kill them can put you at a bit of risk. The shotgun is a powerhouse but its reach is short, the rifle lets you fire a very powerful shot through multiple foes but it is slow to fire, and automatics like the AK-47 or SMGs will eat through their ammo quickly despite being the perfect tools for holding some ground. You can only carry a single weapon at a time plus a back-up explosive, a grenade, molotov cocktail, or land mine good to have in a pinch even if you can take damage from their blasts as well. The constant shuffling between weapons as they run out or break or you just come across something that you think might suit the situation better gives you some more meaningful considerations while out on the road, but it would definitely feel more impactful if more of the zombies put up a proper fight. Even the game’s few unique bosses still feel like they don’t have enough oomph to their attacks to make them threatening, and with the game placing Twinkies as healing pick-ups around liberally it even offsets the moment it did put some pressure on you.

You can still angle for the Zombie Kill of the Week though in co-op multiplayer, a particularly flashy kill getting a special highlight that encourages you to find a little more creativity in your inflicted chaos. This can just boil down to using the environmental kills, but activating a construction vehicle or blasting a gas tank are satisfying and sometimes over the top ways to wreck a lot of zombies at once so its hard to argue with its judgment. Each character has a special ability they can build up towards as well, these being things like a special attack or ability buff but unfortunately even though there are a few unlockable characters including people from Zombieland: Double Tap and even getting to play as the zombies you’re facing, they just recycle the special abilities for them, removing the one true differentiator between them beyond voice lines. Your leveling up abilities is character specific though and you can make some artificial difficulty by taking someone with low weapon damage and walking speed into a harder stage, but the game’s horde mode can sometimes show that a good mix of zombie types would be a better way to make harder moments in the game rather than counting on the player forgoing the offered power-ups just to seek a challenge.

 

That horde mode has the potential to perhaps being a great way to achieve longevity too. The story mode’s road trip is a bit short even if you do take some of the side roads to play the optional levels that mostly just reuse previous stages, but the horde mode at the gas station actually pushes against you quite well as it limits your weapon options so you need to actually conserve the better stuff, helpful items like a screen clearing nuke or those healing Twinkies are also limited, and the enemy groupings can have clear thematic ideas like a surge of clowns that can lead to heavy knife cross fire. The gas station almost seems like it’s poised as the easy mode of the few available horde challenges, the others having longer waves, but while the wider spaces already make it easier to avoid zombies in places like the amusement park, the actual thing holding these stages back is the game’s abundant technical problems. It is not all that rare to find a zombie standing in place unsure on where it should go, and the game seems reticent to spawn in too many at a time in some areas so when a bunch of zombies end up standing out in the open doing nothing, it thins their potential advantage of a clustered horde. In a normal level you will still see this but you’ll often pass by the area and eventually the game will replace the literal brain-dead undead, but in levels where you are meant to cover the same ground repeatedly it keeps those idling non-threatening enemies in play.

 

The main game’s side mission about trying to earn high kills in a junkyard is probably the hardest things get because it’s tightly packed and there isn’t room for those zombies to forget what they’re doing as even the glitched out ones will be hit by your efforts to kill others, but even the game’s attempt at a final stand can be harmed by glitches. For some reason in the final level of the game I found my weapons would just stop firing after a while, even when they had both reserve ammo and ammo loaded. It wasn’t a button issue as the game recognized the input with things like the minigun spinning up, but it wouldn’t fire still, only newly picked up guns firing properly until they eventually hit on the issue to. This only happened in this stage and luckily the final stand has many back-up guns around you and choke points, but it also shows how low the difficulty is that that segment was still cleared with such a glitch holding me back. Another more amusing but occasionally present glitch relates to the character voices, such as a moment where Tallahassee’s post-level victory quote would sometimes play with proper voice acting but other times was read out by a text-so-speech program. While harmless glitches like that voice line flub are easily overlooked, Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip gives off the air of a poorly put together experience because it’s not too hard to run into technical problems, especially ones that actually impede the play like the shooting bug and zombie stupidity.

THE VERDICT: If everything in Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip worked as intended, it would be a decent if perhaps too easy zombie shooter with some fun character interactions and the rare level like the junkyard where the challenge finds its footing. Instead, the simple thrills become dull walks through levels where too many zombies end up standing in place unable to figure out they’re meant to be trying to kill you, that glitch undermining most of the horde mode stages and some levels that try to be more than moving forward in a line from objective to objective. A twin-stick shooter that doesn’t require a lot of thought to survive can be a fine enough time waster, but one that fails to muster up proper opposition because its enemies sometimes can’t even detect the player robs many moments of the kind of pressure that would still need to exist to make the widespread bloodshed have some weight behind it.

 

And so, I give Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip for Xbox One…

A BAD rating. The four characters at the heart of Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip have a simple but fun kind of chemistry that makes the moments they speak up worth listening to, but it’s not enough to buoy the action that takes a huge hit when the glitches become too apparent to ignore. The constant weapon shuffle would be a great concept for a game that was able to properly pressure you, but weapon damage too quickly ends the supposedly tougher enemy variants and ones like the Ninja are undone by their inability to attack while running. Even when the ones that still work enter the mix, the clowns or the vomiting women might just forget what they’re meant to do and stand around, removing the important parts of the game’s attempt to up the difficulty because it can’t keep every enemy focused on the characters. Squeezing out some actual challenging level experiences still isn’t impossible, the gas station in horde mode succeeds because it can apply some decent pressure, but you’re more likely to blast your way through an area without too much worry no matter how big your group is or even which zombie types are active since the mixes aren’t threatening enough to really keep you on your toes. With the game releasing just days before the film perhaps that deadline meant those glitches slipped through, denying it a spot as a serviceable zombie shooter, but it still needed a bigger design push to make the shooting more exciting.

 

Zombie shooters aren’t rare, but the Zombieland brand could have made this a unique experience. Bringing its comedic angle that helped it stand out next to more serious takes on zombie apocalypse films made it rise above many of them in its box office earnings, but Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip needed to have its zombies be a serious threat if it wanted it to play well. The comedic writing and ideas could still be part of the action, but the undead still need to be threatening to make the interactive side of things entertaining, and when they too often break and end up standing in place with no idea what to do, too much of that is lost. While this road trip does have some of the fun stops you’d hope for it to have, it also unfortunately has plenty of the dull stretches that appear on a cross-country journey that make the reality of it less than thrilling.