The Dark Furie

I told him to stay back, told him I'd deal with it. He didn't listen to me and that's why it all fell apart when he ran forwards. My life after that was a walking nightmare. One mad dash after another to the end.

Day Five

I'd been working my way around the jungle attempting to help some scientists come up with a cure for the disease that was turning people into monsters. After a particularly dramatic moment I found myself ready to move on to the final area - the prison. Banoi used to be a penal colony you see, and the worlds terrorists are housed in that prison. A great place to go for help, eh? As it turns out the prisoners were happy to help me out and give me missions, while the guards had a habit of shooting at me and trying to turn me into paste. Unfortunately it was this help from the prisoners that screwed me over in a massive way.

Let me preface this story by explaining how the save system in this game works. You get to a checkpoint in a mission a certain place or a certain amount of time passes and the game autosaves. You want to come off and you progress is saved while your position is reset to the last autosave. When you reload, the game places you in the state you were. There are no multiple save slots so you can keep a backup and go back to it. If you make a bad decision you're stuck with it, and if the save gets corrupted then it's lost. This is normally not a problem in a game like this and hadn't been for the majority of the forty hours of gameplay I got out of the game. That is until the escort mission.

I'd been playing Logan the throwing expert all through the game and had a bit of a hard time due to the game being built for four players and not rebalanced for single player at all. Logan gets bonus damage and a chance of instantly killing an enemy if he throws weapons at them. As he has a skill that gives a chance of the weapon boomeranging back into his hand after throwing it makes a lot of sense to hurl like crazy when confronted with a tough enemy and hope he goes down before you've lost all your weapons. If you do lose them all they'll usually be sticking out of the zombie and you can dash in and grab them from him if you can avoid getting hit. It's a tactic that had been serving me well for the last twenty hours against the larger enemies but this time was different.

I'd been tasked with finding and rescuing someone trapped in a cell block and was escorting them to safety when we came across a Thug zombie (bigger and tougher than most but not quite one of the boss types). I resorted to my old faithful method and threw weapons, hitting weak points and severing his arms. Eventually all my weapons were in the zombie and his health was so low that he needed one final hit to take him out. I stepped forward and aimed at one of my weapons, trying to pull it out of the zombie. At this point the person I'd been escorting decided he needed some glory and he rushed forwards, directly into the waiting teeth of the armless zombie who killed him with one bite. The mission failed and I was forced to reload from a checkpoint. I loaded in happily enough but then found that not only had the weapons I'd been building up and finding throughout the game weren't on my character, but that a new zombie had replaced the old Thug and my weapons had disappeared from the game entirely.

Weapons, lovely weapons. I remember those.

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I spent the rest of the game using whatever weapons I could find around the prison as I went. To give you an idea of the difference that made to the game, my weapons did about eight hundred damage minimum, while the ones I was finding in the prison were mostly able to do between three hundred and five hundred damage. The almost constant stream of deaths thanks to using the quality of weapons that I'd been finding over ten hours ago made sure that I had no money to even buy newer ones, and the final boss of the game became a nightmare. Actually, scratch that. He's a nightmare in single player anyway, but I was so woefully unprepared by the time I got to him that I only barely beat him through luck.

I'd put up with a few odd design decisions in this game, the lack of balancing, some glitches and even the fact that so much of the game story seems to have been cut out to save on disc space. I put up with those problems because despite them the game was an incredible amount of fun. To get that far in and have all the hard work I put into gathering my weapons and modding them for extra damage and effects snatched away from me was devastating. I had no way to return to the island to even do sidequests in easier places and rebuild my weapon stash, no way to get better weapons at all. I just had to slowly grind through enemies, running where possible and dying repeatedly. Put simply, the last five hours of this game were a chore for me rather than the fun they could have been due to the way the saves work and the unforgivably stupid AI of that escort mission. It dragged the whole game down for me.

I've started a new game with a couple of other characters. Luckily none of them have a reliance on throwing weapons so I shouldn't have that problem again. All in all I enjoyed my time in this game and I'm not going to let the one in a million chance that destroyed my first game ruin the rest of it for me. It may not be a perfect game by a long shot but there is a hell of a lot of fun there and, if the developers were to make another, I'd recommend they stick to the wide open areas as this is where the game shines. I'll be taking even more time going through in my future playthroughs and arranging more sets of weapons to keep in storage towards the end of the game. Forewarned is forearmed after all, and with an army of zombies after you, you need as many armaments as possible.

Put the kettle on. I'm at the airport and getting in a taxi.