Beat on Hard as the exorcist. He seemed like the most interesting character as the only one using holy weapons, and 1 of 2 that could use swords. I expected him to play like a mage. This was an interesting game, pretty much a low budget linear Diablo set in a modern zombie apocalypse. I noticed early on that the starter weapons had infinite durability while actual weapons broke extremely quickly. It did fulfill that trope of having to continuously scavenge new weapons like in many zombie games. All the other characters had fists and kicks as their default weapons while the exorcist had a dagger and cross that shot holy bolts. So he was the only class that had infinite ranged attack, and I used that basic attack for most of the game. Early on I used a sword and crucifix and was shocked to see how much the crucifix cost to repair. $500! That was the cost to buy a new one! Holy weapons were some of the most expensive weapons while melee were cheap. The level up stats were a little confusing as rather than the usual str, int, dex, vit etc it was melee, weapon, str (equal boost to both melee and weapon), spiritual, and intelligence (small boost to all damage types). I initially put several points into weapon thinking that vague term applied to anything that could be equipped. I put a few in melee and 1 in int. Then for the rest of the game I pumped spiritual due to how effective that infinite cross was. In fact I barely used the sword and eventually stopped carrying any melee weapons because even a high end sword could not do the damage of my pumped up holy bolt. Instead I put 1 of the other holy weapons in my right click hand. Holy water and blessed oil were melee range and good for hitting multiple enemies in a cone, while bibles and scrolls did a point blank 360 nuke like flash from Diablo 1. The scroll had the best passive stats so I usually equipped that assuming its stats would apply to my cross. After playing through much of the game I looked up online to find that the weapon stat only applied to physical ranged weapons; guns, flamethrower, crossbow and taser. Maybe grenades too? Which explained why the crossbow and taser I tried later in the game did such poor damage. Thinking about the stats more, they were very poorly designed. Str boosted melee and ranged damage by 20% while the individual stats boosted by 40%. So you could achieve the same result by splitting points between those 2 or focusing on str. So why have str at all? There was not a stat cap. Even worse, int boosted all damage types by 10% so 4 points there to get 40% to all would be the same as putting 1 point into melee, ranged and magic. The same stats for 1 fewer point? Stupid. Str and int should have been redesigned to help with hp and stamina, or something to make every stat worthwhile.

My 1st death was immediately at the beginning of chapter 2 as 3 zombies rushed me. It was then that I discovered the hard of Hard difficulty was absurd damage done by enemies, to the point were even a basic zombie could 2 or 3 shot my guy while also being increasingly bullet spongy as the game went on. The first few chapters of the game were good with enemies dying in a few hits but eventually enemies took 20+ despite pumping the appropriate stat. This could be reduced with special attacks but stamina was very limited to the point that I preferred saving it for defensive skills. The exorcist had amazing defensive skills with my most used being a full health heal over 12 seconds, which became even more useful after becoming infected. Unusual twist in this game; a few chapters in the character became infected with the zombie whatever, which manifested as a permanent poison effect that could kill the character over 2 minutes or so. The early game was bad enough with no free healing other than upon level up, having to rely on the limited supply of healing items. There were medicine consumables that temporarily stopped the poison while also healing but that heal spell allowed me to pretty much ignore items. I died a lot but there seemed to be no death penalty whatsoeve, with even boss hp not resetting. Some of the stronger enemies could even hit for 80%+ of my max hp. There were 2 other healing skills that did more healing immediately without the over time component but the stupid Diablo 3 style of skill setup made it awkward to switch skills; there were only 2 slots for defensive skills, left click and right click for equipped weapons that could be set to normal attack or a special, and 3 passive slots. The game did not pause in the inventory or skill screens, nor were their hotkeys to use whatever I wanted like in Diablo 1 and 2. All the slots had xbox controller buttons so seemed like the game was more designed for consoles rather than let me use the multitude of keyboard keys. I sometimes put a special attack on my right click since I almost never used the basic scroll/bible attack; the rain of fire was good for area damage despite its limited range. My other defense skill was rapture, which gave 8 full seconds of invincibility. Extremely valuable, and I needed it to beat certain extreme difficulty enemies without death scumming or chugging health items like a fat kid at an all you can eat cake buffet. Unfortunately it had a long cooldown so there were times that I did something else on my other PC or around the house while waiting. Other times I swapped to dodge while waiting since it gave +15% chance to negate 100% damage. I still took armor damage while invulnerable, which was a little annoying since armor could not be repaired. The other defense skill gave a flat 20% damage reduction, but because of the extreme enemy damage I preferred all or nothing damage reduction. For passives I used +stamina on kill, reduced stamina costs, and reduced cooldowns. I occasionally used the holy fire skill on my crucifix if I felt it was safe enough to be without healing magic. I used triple strike on melee for the limited time I used a sword.

Enemies were very tedious to kill and there were only a handful of different types mechanically. Slow zombies were easy to kite, even when using melee, and were only a threat in tight spaces and numbers. They did reveal some unusual mechanics. The most annoying was when shift clicking to attack the character would often run away to a certain spot before being able to attack. It was like only certain positions on the playable area were coded to be legit points from which to attack. It seemed to happen more with 1 handed weapons though, whether melee or ranged, and only while shift clicking. Ranged attacks always auto hit unless something blocked the shot so there was no need to lead targets. Melee always hit too; there seemed to be no defensive stats for enemies at all other than hp. Another thing was that sometimes the character slowed down when trying to get past enemies, npcs, or terrain obstructions, which imply some problems with collision code. I do wonder if the areas in this game were purchased from a store and not meant for a Diablo style game. Medium speed zombies were just harder to kite and ran away to heal once. I could kill them before they healed early on but this later became impossible with the basic cross attack. I probably could have killed them fast enough by having a rosary (best holy bolt weapon) in the offhand with a special attack assigned; fight normally with cheap cross then burn down with stamina while it healed. Fast zombies ran as fast as the player but I could still kite them by shooting a holt bolt into their face and immediately moving away. Occasionally I messed up the timing and took a hit. A safer but more time consuming way was to bait them into attacking because they were locked in place during attack animations. The final boss was a hulk with this same behavior, so he was laughably easy. These bastsrds also ran off to heal. Dogs were too fast to kite. They required high front loaded damage from range or a defense skill. The worst enemies in the game by far were the few ranged enemies. I'm not talking about the medium speed vomiters, rather the early prison boss who was a sprinter with a throwing knife attack. The controls were too clunky to allow any kind of manual avoidance of shots so I had to rely on skills and health items. Thankfully these enemies were extremely rare. There were 1 or 2 other ranged zombie bosses, those damn human body guards with pistols in a single level, and the 1st form of the final boss. I killed a couple of those guards with kiting but the place was somewhat confined so I spent far more time waiting for invincibility cooldown rather than actually fighting. Later at the end game were smugglers and soldiers with rifles that comically chased me at a casual walking pace and could only shoot less than half the screen. They were just as easy as slow zombies. The infection was in the rain so presumably everyone was infected and maybe that was why they were so incompetent? The end also featured a couple tanks and 1 helicopter that killed in 1 hit. So I took off all my armor and sniped them from just off screen as they were too dumb to move closer. There is something about a priest brandishing a crucifix and blowing up military vehicles with holy bolts that was hilarious. The power of Christ compels you, metal abomination.

The game annoyed me with a lot of points of no return. I even accidentally left behind some loot. They should have put in warnings at least. There were a number of gimmick set pieces along the way. Cutting power to let the zombie prisoners out in a big fight, an escort mission after the prison which was insanely difficult as the other characters. That healing prayer affected allies too so the exorcist definitely had the edge with escorts. After that was a level with redneck snipers shooting at the player and zombies. I had to use cover, timing and audio cues to avoid being shot. Later driving cars was introduced with easy kills running enemies over. There were human enemies with automatics too but I never fought them on foot. These 2 levels were annoying with lame fetch quests and no full map. None of the other areas needed maps because they were so linear. The next interesting thing was a somewhat unique boss fight against a guy using a taser (which were more like lightning bolt guns), followed by a time limit escape. Soon after that was the point where I failed over a dozen times and frustratingly could not find any help online. I had to protect a helicopter pilot, but the zombies did so much damage to him and took so long to kill that I could not keep him alive. Letting an escort die loaded the last checkpoint save, as opposed to death which just teleported me to that checkpoint with all progress saved, including enemy hp. There was a dog in between the checkpoint and pilot that I was seriously getting sick of killing, and out of sheer frustration I ran to the pilot with it chasing me and ran back to the checkpoint. The pilot followed me, ignoring all the zombies who were too slow to even try chasing us and I easily killed them all while the pilot stayed at the checkpoint. Damn that was easy but I never even thought to try it. The end game was after this and I finished at level 30 with something like $120,000 since I barely used any items or proper weapons. It sucked that the character became unplayable after beating the game, but would I really want to play this game more?

Next I did the Marshal which was kind of like a paladin. He had 2 healing skills and I kept both equipped; a small low cost fast cooldown heal, and a big expensive long cooldown. They did affect allies a little but not enough to really help. I did discover that the trick to getting that helicopter pilot to follow me was using a heal close to him which somehow broke his AI or something. I also discovered that the game does not even pause when pressing esc, but that even going into the inventory menu made faster enemies run from the player. So I could change skills and gear mid combat. I even abused this for dogs to reset them when they got close. Seemed like the regular slow zombies still chased me and could result in a nasty surprise upon exiting the menu though. So it appeared they coded the enemies to ignore the player while in the menu instead of a proper pause. For my 3 passive skills I used: medic (slower infection hp loss), armor (significantly less damage taken) and a damage boost. I used a mix of melee and guns throughout the game while putting almost all points into weapon (I put a few into str at the beginning). He got passive damage skills for blunt, pistol and flamethrower. This meant that axe and shotgun were not great weapons, doing noticeably less damage. The cattle decapitation skill for 2 handed axes was awesome though, often killing zombies with 1 hit. Axes were dirt cheap to repair too. This style was not fun though because the attack required full stamina and led to a lot of down time while waiting for stamina to regen. As enemies got tougher it stopped being able to 1 shot so I had to weaken them with normal attacks. The skill could also be used with chainsaws, but they were more expensive than axes for no real advantage. I eventually stopped using melee altogether upon realizing I had 1000s of bullets; far more than needed for the entire game. I liked having the massive damage high cost head shot on right click with the cheap damage over time boom on left click. The shotgun was weak but good enough to kill slow zombies, soldiers and vehicles. Dual pistols was much better and it was fun alternating attacks and counting shots to make sure 1 hand did not force a reload while the other still had bullets. Late game I tried out flamethrower for the first time and the damage was devastating. It killed zombies in mere seconds, never needed to reload and had high durability. I smoked both forms of the final boss in seconds. Best weapon in the game though not enough range to safely use on ranged enemies. He could use molotovs but not grenades, and they did terrible damage. I did find it odd that a cop could use chainsaws and flamethrowers but not tasers. Seriously missed design opportunity there.

Next up was the marine, who turned out to be more of a gun specialist because he had passive damage boosts for all the ranged weapons he could use yet none for melee. I put all points into ranged and only used melee up to the graveyard, where I switched to exclusively using guns even though he did get that decapitation skill for 2h axes. The game was so much faster and more fun going dual pistols. By the hospital I had found the best shotgun and used that enough to repair it twice. It was a big difference having the shotgun passive damage skill but dual pistols was still overall better because of the faster rate of fire and lack of delay between shooting and being able to move again; they just had to stand there and pump the shotgun as if it was inconceivable that you could pump and move at the same time. His machine guns turned out to be very disappointing because none of the special attacks could be used; they were auto attack only. I did use the best machine gun for killing those slow soldiers but it was only slightly better than just using shotgun auto attacks, nevermind adding in specials. The rocket launcher was a different story. I first used it at the helicopter pilot when it first became available for sale just before, and I never would have gotten past that without such powerful area attacks. Good thing there was no friendly/self fire. The only other time I used it was for the final boss. The 1st form was wrecked but the hulk proved difficult because the launcher had to be reloaded after every shot. I had to use camouflage between each shot to get enough safe distance to reload. Camo was great against ranged and fast enemies but not needed most of the time. The other defense skill was freeze, which was great for fast enemies. I even used it on some of those body guards since it prevented them from attacking. Passives were armor again, appropriate damage boost and +hp from food. Not having healing skills was a huge struggle early on but by the time I got past the sewers and purchased everything the shop had each time, I had way more than I needed. I actually had to micromanage what foot to eat so that I left none behind. I didn't even need to use medicine.

Next was the assassin who was excellent at melee, ranged, healing and defense. He had the same 2 defensives as the marine; camo and freeze. Bloodlust was an excellent passive that healed after each kill, which greatly lessened the need for food and medicine. My other passives were typically a melee damage boost paired with pistol damage, only swapping in bonus healing from food as needed. He overall played very similar to the marine and I put every point into ranged. He could only use 1 handed melee weapons but got all 3 passive damage boosts. Swords were faster than blunt and axe but had a bit less range. Once melee began to drop off I swapped it out for another pistol. I tried crossbows out later but found them to be not that good because of the reload after each shot; worse than shotguns. Rifles were good though; better base stats than pistols but without a passive damage boost for some reason. They were more expensive to repair than to buy, so I went through a few. The taser turned out to be his best weapon, with good range, fast attack and large clip. I was worried about the helicopter pilot but managed to beat it after a few tries by using freeze and standing there chugging food while first killing the zombies attacking the pilot. For some reason the assassin could use machine guns even though it was not listed on the character screen. He had no passive damage boost for them so it was less effective than as the marine. I still used up a few ARs killing those late gun enemies. I used a mix of boom and headshot for the guns, though the taser was auto attack only. He did need to use camo a lot for dangerous enemies, including the final boss, and still needed some food and medicine.

Last was the butcher who I decided would put every point into melee to get a better idea of how melee scaled in the late game, and how good flamethrowers and rockets would be without any points in ranged. The butcher was hard to play early on because his melee attacks were slower than the other characters, especially the 2 handed weapons which he swung with 1 hand like a dumbass. It made sense that he had the least combat training out of all the classes, but come on who swings a baseball bat, axe or sledgehammer with 1 hand? His basic kick attack was fast though, and I found the best tactic was to equip a 1 handed melee with good stats while killing mostly with the kick. Later he got cattle decapitation for 2 handed axes, which 1 shot all non boss enemies. The 2 handed axe also had good range on basic attacks when compensating for the slow attack speed while 2 handed blunt was not even fit to use due to lack of reach. There was also a distinction between knives and swords as he could not use the latter. So why was the marine not able to use knives? That is part of military training, unlike chainsaws. The butcher only got passive damage boosts for blunt, axe, chainsaws, grenades and flamethrower. The flamethrower did indeed turn out to be lousy without any points into ranged. The butcher would be viable, possibly even better, with full ranged build. For some reason he could use grenades but not molotovs. Rocket launcher was ok during the end game as it 1 shot soldiers with the go nuclear special attack, and 2 shot otherwise, but the reload after each shot often led to taking damage. It was generally better to just kick the bastards while invulnerable. For passives I used armor, bonus hp from food and appropriate weapon damage (usually axe). For defense I used tremor, which was mechanically the same as freeze so why bother making it different, and rage which said it gave 50% damage reduction. It actually gave more like 90 to 99% damage reduction, lasted a good 12 seconds, used enough stamina to allow tremor to be used soon after (great combo for healers), and had a short cooldown. It was even better than the exorcist's invincibility, and the butcher absolutely needed the help to melee bosses. Later he got the same big heal as the marshal but I only used it a few times while looting when no fighting would be happening. I tried using that on the helicopter pilot but he kept getting caught on the zombies, so I just tanked them with axe. It worked out though the pilot barely survived. I killed most gun enemies and even the final boss with the basic kick, which was beyond lame. Serious design flaw to make his melee weapon animations so slow that not using a weapon had better dps.

I did enjoy this game, mainly due to the concept of combining a Diablo style game with the zombie apocalypse. It was fun to manage the timing and range for melee combat, shots before reload for guns, limited resources, and learn how to optimize each class. Unfortunately, the more I played the more I realized how poorly designed this game was. The biggest problem was the slow pace forced by the obnoxiously slow stamina regen. Waiting around to be able to use the best abilities was not fun, nor was being limited to just a few slots. I want combat to be a fluid dance where I weave several abilities together on the fly with tactics without worrying about resource cost or cooldowns. This could have been fixed by making food restore stamina, rebalancing abilities to account for more frequent use, and allowing more slots for abilities. I did rebind food to Z, medicine to Q and defense skills to X and C, so it should not be difficult to let me bind every skill. The weapon, class, ability and stat design was another problem. The class trees were almost all generic abilities that were shared between multiple classes, which eroded the distinctiveness of each class. There were too many unnecessary skills, especially for weapon attacks; some I did not even bother to try. Shotguns and crossbows should have allowed movement while reloading, or at least allowed manually triggered reloads and pumps. They also should have had unique features, like multi target hit for the shotgun and penetration multi hits for crossbow; also retrieving bolts to shoot again. Machine guns needed vastly better damage per shot and the ability to use special attacks. Grenades and molotovs needed rocket launcher levels of damage. The butcher and exorcist had overpowered basic weapons that negated the point of finding better gear. I did not fully try out the basic unarmed attacks of the other characters as they were all very effective with melee weapons (unlike the butcher). All they had to do was switch the animation speeds to make the butcher's melee weapon attacks faster than kicking, just like his punch. The exorcist's basic ranged attack was unique but should have been balanced in some way. They also should have zoomed out the camera to be better able to see and target enemies on the bottom of the screen, removed auto aim for more skill based shooting, and fixed the clunky controls. The story was incredibly lame with each character's dialogue being exactly the same after the beginning. Like why bother to pay 5 different voice actors to say the exact same lines? Better to have unique dialogue for each throughout the entire game but without any acting.

Overall this game was light years behind the original Diablo with some baffling and unbalanced design decisions, and general lack of polish. It barely gets

6.0/10