7/4/2023 0 Comments School girl zombie hunterThe actual controls are very loose and wonky sounds like the best word to describe them. The camera hates you and everyone you love and stops at nothing to obscure the most logical part of the screen to focus on. The control layout is awkward, with the left shoulder buttons being used to jump and run, the gun is zoomed in the X button and aimed with the right thumbstick. SG/ZH could actually be fun if the gameplay mechanics weren’t completely janky. The stages are short, but in order to artificially extend the game length they require multiple playthroughs to collect all the items and get the girls to an appropriate level to progress through the next stage and level grinding is done at a lethargic snail’s pace. These sequences are all far too long for the lack of entertainment they provide, and the stages are either find so many keycards where one is usually hidden on each floor of stage, kill so many zombies, find a destination or defend the base. Depending on the type of stage there is anywhere from a three to fifteen minute time limit, and there are cutscenes of dialog before each stage. The problem is it only shows potential to do this. I’ll let your imagination figure out the logic behind how that works (Editor’s note: ew).įrom the previous paragraphs, if the title didn’t give it away, SG/ZH is not a high brow AAA title, but does show the potential of being enjoyable on a risque B-movie type of level. Basically if a girl has been wearing a pair of underwear for 10 minutes game time, she can take a shower and the underwear becomes a powerful piece of bait for the zombies. Special items are acquired during gameplay such as AED devices, health packs, hand grenades and about midway through the game the players gets the underwear trap item. The outfits don’t really effect anything besides the appearance, and to coincide with the horror themed fan service clothing shows visible signs of falling apart as the characters receive damage. Different types of weapons and outfits get unlocked, and the characters are able to equip multiple guns at once and cycle through them such as assault rifles, submachine guns, rocket launchers, shotguns and sniper rifles. The different girls gain experience levels by killing zombies, and after a stage is beaten it can be replayed with any unlocked character to level grind. This theme continues throughout the game’s progression. It also seems oddly fetishistic of the zombies to go after the school uniforms and ignore the half naked young women. For a game set in the Onechanbara universe it seemed our female gunslingers were dressed quite modestly, that is until a random button was pressed and her uniform was thrown at the walking dead to use as bait and she continued to run around the scenario in her underwear with a flashlight strapped to her midsection, which seemed like an especially peculiar choice for an under garment. The default weapon is the school issued handgun, which seems odd since SG/ZH seems like it takes place in Japan and I thought only Chicago issued handguns to its public school students. One is that in the options menu the color of blood can be changed from red to black, green, white or pink. There are a few odd things right off the bat that are noticed. The basic premise is the world is in some state of zombie apocalypse, and the player is at a school where five girls have survived and they are the only hope at thwarting the shambling undead. The question is does SG/ZH cross into the realm of campy guilty pleasures or is this something that should be cremated, buried and forgotten? Naturally, when one takes a game set in the same universe as Onechanbara that features adolescent girls in school uniforms packing heat and fighting zombies, there is no expectation of goodness, especially with a title as generic as School Girl/Zombie Hunter, though the homage to some up and coming band called AC/DC in their logo is a nice touch. This can happen, as was the case with the cinematic triumph of The Running Man, but more often than not bad things are just so bad they remain bad, like any video game related Uwe Boll film, though we have discussed doing a retrospective of his work in a series of articles called the Summer of Boll$#*!. Sometimes we immediately know something is bad but explore it anyway hoping that it crosses into the realm of so bad it’s good.
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