For JumpCore, Zombies & Real Time Strategy Pair Up Well

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

For JumpCore, Zombies & Real Time Strategy Pair Up Well

Two great tastes that taste great together; it's an old description of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, but it's also an exciting way to look at games. An upcoming title from JumpCore, “Undead Overlord”, looks to put that principle to work, bringing zombies and a real-time strategy game together in one handy package.

“Undead Overlord” is something of an unusual concept when it comes to gaming. Instead of sending out people into the midst of a zombie apocalypse to permanently kill the walking dead, this time, we instead take control of said walking dead to go forth and feast on humanity. The overriding goal here seems to be exactly what a zombie's goal should be: to eat the flesh of the living. Essentially, it is a zombie apocalypse as played from inside the apocalypse, not from outside, almost like popular indie game “Infectionator” writ large.

But it won't just be a collective of shambling corpses; taking a page from “Left 4 Dead” and similar zombie romps, there are different classifications of zombie, particularly “boss zombies” that can bring extra firepower to the field as required by the handlers of the zombie mob in question.

The company behind “Undead Overlord” has recently launched a Kickstarter in support of the game, and is out to raise fully $60,000 by November 1 in order to bring the game out. It's a title geared toward PC and tablets—there's no word on if it will go console eventually or not, and given the increasing support for indie gaming as shown by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony of late, that's not out of line to suggest—and promises a little something different in the field.

The game is developed in part by Cameron Petty, who has previously developed such games as “San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing,” “Killer Instinct” competitor “Primal Rage,” and “City of Heroes,” with much of the rest of the staff coming off a variety of titles covering a variety of fields, so concerns about a lack of expertise should be quite put to rest.

But it's the idea itself that has to give the typical gamer pause. After all, we're looking at something seldom done before. Sure, it's capitalizing on a couple seldom-miss principles like real-time strategy gameplay and a whole load of zombies, but it's taking these standard ingredients and throwing them together in a whole new fashion. That's what a lot of the entertainment industry could use more of; taking a couple different pages out of a couple different books and cobbling said pages together into a totally different book. Keep some familiar parts so as to draw interest, but use these parts in a different way, providing both the familiar and the peculiar to make a game that should be tough to resist, as long as everything's done properly.

While it remains to be seen how this will do—or if it will even get off the ground, though the fact that it's over five percent funded in its first two days doesn't seem to hurt—it's still a sufficiently clever idea that it's hard to ignore. Personally, I'm hopeful this will make it to its goal, even if I'm not much of a PC gamer. It's a clever idea, and clever ideas could use a bit more love than they're getting lately.
Enhanced by Zemanta


Featured Events