VIDEO GAME REVIEW: 'Yakuza: Dead Souls' adds zombies, forgets to do anything else
"Yakuza: Dead Souls" is a strange game.
It takes the "Yakuza" series, which usually revolves around organized crime in Japan, and adds zombies.
It’s a game that could have been just crazy enough to actually be enjoyable, but the reality is "Yakuza: Dead Souls" is a game with an outdated and frustrating control scheme, boring enemies that seem to be taken from other games and a mediocre story filled with boring sub-stories and mini-games.
One of the first hurdles players must clear in order to garner any enjoyment out of "Yakuza: Dead Souls" is the awful controls.
Even the basic controls for moving the character and the camera are a pain.
Moving the character around feels really imprecise, and the camera floats too much. The controls are already difficult, but things get worse once players need to aim at something.
When the player aims their gun, the camera swings around to whatever direction the character is physically facing, regardless of where the camera is initially pointed. If the player has the camera pointed at a bunch of zombies but the character is facing a wall, the camera will snap around and aim at the wall instead of the zombies.
This leads to a lot of infuriating combat scenarios, because the player has to make sure their character is physically facing a target before aiming. It also makes strafing pretty difficult.
Luckily, the enemies aren’t fun to fight anyway. There are run-of-the-mill zombies and special zombies called mutants. The crazy thing about a lot of the mutants is they seem to have been lifted directly from "Left 4 Dead."
There is a mutant type called Fatties that not only function like Boomers from "Left 4 Dead," but look almost exactly the same. The game basically copies all of the specialized zombies from "Left 4 Dead" and just slaps a different name on them.
The story is pretty boring as well. The main storyline follows several different characters during the zombie outbreak. It isn’t awful, but it’s certainly not great.
The sub-stories, however, make the main plot look like Oscar material. These side quests usually involve extremely dull premises that always end up with the player going to fetch something in the quarantine zone. It wouldn’t be so bad if the player could complete more than one of them at a time, but that’s not usually an option.
There is a very specific and small audience that might enjoy this game, but most people should stay far away.
Game: Yakuza: Dead Souls Platforms: Playstation 3 Genre: Third-Person-Action ESRB Rating: M (Mature) Score: 1 out of 5
