A few months back Valves announced that there won’t be Left 4 Dead 3 anytime soon, and instead, we got Zombie Army 4 which couldn’t have hoped for better timing.
It’s here to follow in those four-player co-op footsteps so that it may feel a little used to overall, but zombie army 4 does achieve to detach itself from the already sizeable group of co-op gauntlet shooters in a few enjoyable ways.
For starters, the campaign is enjoyably strange as occult forces of the Nazi army back from the dead apparently from the literal guts of the underworld. There’s also a horde mode of staying in one location and seeing how many waves of zombies you can survive before you’re unavoidably eaten alive but the diversity and forward impetus of the 8-hour campaign makes it the tougher mode.
The world war 2 background is full of gore in an imaginative way where it’s exhilarating to see what kind of zombie is around the corner, challenging powerful enemies like flamethrower zombies with scorching gas tanks on their spines and bosses like tanks that expose massive rib cages when their armored sides are blown off.
The Co-op mode does a good job of contextualizing why its necessary to move one location to another and it is beyond basic endurance as sometimes you travel through an abandoned zoo or other times, you’re gathering up pieces of a bomb.
The purpose is simple enough where you and your friends will never be muddled about what to do next but stimulating and diverse enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re continuously doing a similar thing.
There is an amazingly fun thing when you die, your body turns into a zombie, and you get to watch as your reawakened character strolls along with the crowd and develops into another hindrance for your friends to overcome and you can only respawn after they slay you, so it works as an enjoyable handicap. It is also incredibly fun to kill zombie versions of your friends as well.