Land of the Dead : Road to Fiddler's Green

[DeeBye]

Edit: Okay, just got around to playing it for a bit.  I'm less than impressed with what I saw, but there is a sizable nugget of a good game here.  Nice locales, nice zombies, and nice ways to dispatch them (One favourite method I quickly discovered was to blast off a leg and an arm and then club them while they thrashed around on the floor).  One mistake, and you are screwed beyond all hope, and the zombies seem to be able to take a significant amount of headshots before dying.

They've ruined the best zombie-killing weapon.  The shotgun is pathetic, weak, takes about four shells of close-range headshots to kill a zombie, and the reload always chambers four rounds even if you're only reloading one shell.  Annoying.  Every one knows that in close-quarters zom vs. shotgun situations the shotgun wins every time.  You aim, you fire, and their heads evaporate in a cloud of blood and their heads evaporate in a cloud of blood and buckshot: Sublime.
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Yeah, I am a bit disappointed in the weapon power too. All of them seem to have their problems.

The shotgun should be better in close range, but it misses. It's far better when facing a pack at medium range. You can dispatch 3 or 4 zombies in a bloody mess of flying limbs with a couple of shots. When they get close, the shotgun sucks. I think it's a collision detection problem.

The Glock is a nice fast fire weapon, but that's it's weakness. It takes 3-5 headshots to kill anything so you chew through your ammo too quickly. With a full compliment of ammo, it's only useful for about 5 minutes before you have to find more.

The .22 rifle works well enough, but again it takes too many headshots to kill anything. When you factor in the awful reloading time and the fact that it only holds 4 bullets, you can really only use it when facing 1 or 2 zombies at range. If anything gets close you're screwed.

The revolver is probably my most used weapon. 1 or 2 headshots at medium to close range does the job, and reloads fairly quickly.

The sniper rifle is a lot of fun, and there is a nice mission based around it. It's not that great for anything beyond medium range though. It's tricky to aim, and if anything gets in close it's worthless.

The melee weapons for the most part are fairly useless. They have horribly long swing times, and multiple strikes are needed to kill anything. Unless you are absolutely out of ammo for every weapon, don't bother. They are fun though. Hitting a zombie in the head with a hammer is satisfying.

The molotov cocktails and grenades are pretty crappy. I've seen grenades go off in the very center of a bunched zombie pack and only killed about half of them. This shouldn't happen. Again, I think it's bad collision detection.

The M-16 is by far the best weapon. 1 or 2 headshots at close to medium range kills as effectively as the revolver, and short bursts at long range works too. It eats through ammo very quickly at long range, so it probably best to use the .22 or the sniper rifle in these situations. You can also carry a lot of ammo for the M-16, which is a huge plus. Among all of the weapons, the M-16 is clearly the winner.

So, for anything in close I like the revolver. For anything at medium range I like the M-16 or the shotgun. For anything at long range I like either the sniper rifle or .22.

I think that they intentionally underpowered the weapons to balance the fact that there aren't hordes of zombies at every turn. To maintain atmosphere, every zombie jumping out at you is an "OH SHI...!!!" moment. I can understand this, but surely there is a better workaround. Oh well.

Land of the Dead is not the best zombie game ever made, but it's worth a playthrough if you like the genre. I'm hoping some user-made mods pop up in the near future.