With Halloween here, the gamer’s mind turns to all the benefits of the season: large amounts of free candy, videogame-themed pumpkins and, of course, the target-rich environment of endless hordes of undead.  They’ve always been the best bad guy for the first person shooter: lots of them, usually slow moving, and they don’t have guns.  But you do.  (They’re also handy if you have to wussify a game like Carmageddon to get an official release).

Not that L4D is the only big-name undead fest on the horizon: Call of Duty 5 servers will also be able to discriminate against the dead in an extremely explosive manner.  The “Zombie mode” looks like being one of the best things to happen to the series - as well as adding some much needed variation to the extremely tried-and-tested World War setting, the bad guys are Zombie Nazis.  Zombie Nazis!  There has never been a better enemy!  You can literally do anything you want to those and not even the most ACLU-ified vegan kitten would object!

If you really can’t wait to get some cadaver-combat going, or you suspect that this Halloween is going to be “The Big One” and want to get some practice in fast, you don’t have to wait.  Logging on to a Zombie Panic server will get you some fast and furious combat, no waiting.  With players as both survivors and zombies you get to try both sides (especially if you suck at the former, because when you die you come back as the latter).

Another undead option is the original idea of Zombie Master.  Here one player, the Zombie Master funnily enough, directs hordes of minions to swamp a desperate team of human survivors.  You get to play either as the brave hero battling against the swarms of an evil controlling intelligence, or - even better - BE that intelligence.  Half Dr Evil, half George Romero, and all fantastic fun.

Get your Zombie-Blasting on this Halloween.  You know you want to.

You enjoy mowing down hordes of evil zombies. You enjoy shooting other players online. Zombie Panic: Source allows you to do both, and the fact that you probably haven’t heard of it before is a crime against creativity on par with using the Statue of David as a coat rack.

The joy of Zombie Panic isn’t just the fun of blowing up zombies. Which is immense, by the way. It’s how it’s the closest you can get to being in an awesome zombie movie without hacking off your right hand (which we don’t recommend - chainsaws don’t work so well with mice). As a survivor you’ll find yourself desperately piling furniture in front of doorways, fleeing for the safety of the group, even shouting “Leave him he’s gone!” over your teamspeak servers while abandoning your too damn slow comrade to the brain-munching hordes.

Never mind shotguns and pistols – sofas and stairs are a real weapon.

You’ll also have to do some very strange things. Things like “holstering” your weapon (that means putting it away - you might not have met this concept in online games before) so you can shove the furniture around. You may even have to drop ammunition, as in “not fire it” (we’ll give you a moment to get over the shock). In most games the only way to get rid of ammo is to throw it into enemy bodies at high velocity. In Zombie Panic, hoarding all the bullets just means you’ll be the dessert after the undead eat your under-armed accomplices - because your attempt to recreate Rambo has left you with the top speed of a parked car.

Playing ZP takes a little getting used to - you’re recommended to log on to an empty Zombie Panic Server to get used to the extra controls. Because when a rotting corpse is trying to unwrap your head like a christmas present isn’t the time to be fiddling with bind keys. And, oh yeah, because you only get one life. One. It’s a genius recreation of the desperate survivor scene - every survivor player wants to stay alive, and getting killed means you join the ranks of the rotting. When that happens you switch teams to the zombie side.

A bad day for humanity

Just when you thought the game couldn’t get cooler.

The game also tackles the deep metaphysical dichotomy of zombification, though probably by accident. Movies occasionally address the pain of the infected, driven to kill and eat friends by insatiable hunger - in Zombie Panic the instant you rise again as a hungering corpse, you’re dead keen to start eating your old friends. And you know exactly where they are.

Zombie Vision: because only the living are scared of the dark

For the humans co-ordination is important, but for the zombies it’s absolutely vital. Slower than the living (and with only a couple of seconds of “lunge” ability), the zombies must use teamspeak servers to flank their opponents. It feels odd to charge a machine-gunning foe with nothing but your rotting fingers - but the fact that you’ll come back from the dead is good. Watching your teammates creeping up behind your killer with your meaningless life as a distraction is better. And the fact that your newly-zombified former enemy will then help you kill his former teammates is absolutely priceless.

This is what we call flanking – the other zombie will come back, the human not so much

Did we mention Zombie Panic is free? What could you possible be waiting for?


Official Site

Zombie Panic at ModDB

Zombie Panic Servers