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• Reviewed on: PC
• Also available for: Xbox, Mac OS X
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• The Good: Uniquely presents life from the zombie's perspective.
• The Bad: No map; vague direction; zombie allies too quickly fall prey to enemies' guns.
• The Verdict: Not just another zombie game, but ultimately far more lacklustre than it promises to be.
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REVIEW:

The Living Dead have been used as cannon fodder in countless video games over the years, from Ghouls n' Ghosts to Resident Evil, House of the Dead to Silent Hill. Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse is not just another zombie game, however. It puts the player in a zombie's shoes, where eating brains, disturbing the peace, and creating an ever-growing zombie horde out of innocent civilians are the orders of the day.

The anti-hero of this affair is former door-to-door salesman Edward Stubblefield, who was brutally murdered in the 1930s, his body unceremoniously buried on a vacant plot of land. Several years later, the futuristic town of Punchbowl (pet project of millionaire industrialist Andrew Monday) was built overtop of Edward's burial place.

Things go awry on Punchbowl's inauguration day when the undead "Stubbs" emerges from the ground as a zombie, remembering nothing of what happened to him and feeling only an overwhelming urge to eat other peoples' brains.

It's a great premise for a game, even if the plot is more than a little murky. Those who don't read the bits of back-story from the manual will be even more confused. Although the story does gradually reveal itself as the game progresses, the overall vagueness unfortunately also carries over into the gameplay, where a feeling of not quite understanding where to go next — or even what's going on in the present — often clouds the experience. There are no maps, and the best strategy seems to be to simply try and eat the brains of every living thing encountered until the next cutscene is triggered.

The city of Punchbowl is a campy throwback to the idyllic 1950s "Leave It to Beaver" era, and it's good cheeky fun — at least for a while — to watch the shabby figure of Stubbs, lit cigarette dangling from his mouth and intestines dangling from his side, shuffle after the terrified citizens as they scream "Stop eating me!" and "That was my favourite arm!"

In one of the coolest features of the game, the citizens that Stubbs attacks actually rise up as zombies themselves, giving Stubbs a mini-army of brain-hungering followers that will meander around and attack.

Beyond Stubbs' basic arm-swat attack and brain-eating "finishing move," he has a few other tricks at his disposal. He can pull out his internal organs and use them as grenades, twist off his head and use it as a bowling ball to mow down enemies, deploy a fart stun-attack, and even detach his forearm — which then crawls Thing-like through ducts to trigger switches or can grasp onto peoples' skulls to allow Stubbs to posses their bodies, giving him access to guns and other weapons and adds a new shooter element to the game.

Despite how this all sounds, the game is not overly gross. The audio does contain a good cross-section of groaning sounds, but if anything, the visuals tend to shy away from graphic and gross-out depictions of violence that one would perhaps expect in a film of equivalent subject matter. The graphics, in fact, are far from stellar, period.

Unfortunately the simplistic nature of Stubbs is ultimately its downfall. Graphics are bland, attacks quickly become repetitive, and the lack of a map or even a compass is sorely felt. Instead of coming up with new and cool ways to zombify people, the game turns more and more into a shooter-type game that pitts Stubbs against adversaries that just keep getting more and more powerful guns — guns that make short work of Stubbs' zombie allies and more often than not leave him flying solo. It's at this point that the game loses a lot of its fun.

The fact is that there are far better shooters out there, and far better third-person action titles as well. The one thing Stubbs has going for it is its uniqueness and the campy excitement evoked by the thought of getting to role-play a zombie. Unfortunately the gameplay doesn't carry the idea far enough.