Felicia Day

First Look: Rock of the Dead

Grab your guitar and shred out to the zombie invasion.

US, February 9, 2010 - When Epicenter, developer of the sleeper first-person shooter Real Heroes: Firefighter visited the IGN offices earlier today, the guys pulled no punches in describing its next game. "Picture Typing of the Dead but with Guitar Hero guitars instead of a QWERTY keyboard," they told me. And what unfolded up on the big screen was exactly that: a Typing of the Dead-inspired action game where you take out zombies and other undead critters by strumming on the Activision (or Harmonix Rock Band) guitars to "shoot" them into submission.

Chalk this one up for the "Why didn’t anyone think of this before?" department. There are several million Guitar Hero and Rock Band guitars out in active use on the Nintendo Wii, and Rock of the Dead targets those peripheral owners with something that’s not just a music game.

It’s deceptively challenging. When the guys at Epicenter started the demo I watched them rock out and take down the zombie invasion with relative ease on the Normal difficulty level. When the guitar was handed off to me, my experience was a bit less than skilled – I’m not the most talented Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitarist around, for starters, but the "new" way of using the peripheral was definitely a learning process. My mind was having a tough time wrapping itself around the horizontal layout of the fret buttons, but after about 10 minutes and taking a few deep breaths to concentrate, I managed to hold my own.

Take down the undead horde with your trusty Guitar Hero controller. There are mindless beasts that take basic three- or four-strum combos to take out, but then there are ones that’ll lob projectiles at you – these knives/bombs only take a couple of fret flicks to get rid of, but unless you take down the guy that’s throwing them out at you, you’ll just be endlessly downing those objects. When the screen fills with a half-dozen beasts at once, you have the ability to discriminate and target specific ones by "typing" out the combo of the one you want – the game’s smart enough to know which beast you’re "aiming" at because it locks in on the enemy as you’re pushing out its fret button code.

Periodically you’ll have to take down larger enemies in rhythm fashion: this is basic Guitar Hero/Rock Band gameplay as the notes must be played to the beat of the background music to take down the threat.

You can play on the basic Easy or Normal difficulty and still get a good challenge, but the true Guitar Hero rockers will probably want to hit Rock of the Dead’s Hard or Expert mode that’ll enable all the fret buttons and bring up the multi-button chords. There’s stock controller contingency plan in place if Nintendo doesn’t allow for the game to require the peripheral, but as of this writing, you’ll need a guitar for Rock of the Dead.

It’s a solid looking Wii title with a tight framerate and a decent art style. Epicenter is going after the "cheesy/campy" look for Rock of the Dead instead of approaching a realistic appearance as it did with Real Heroes: Firefighter. It definitely plays to the Wii’s strengths sticking with something a bit more unrealistic and cartoony, though the team’s pulling off some slick texture tricks like normal mapping and lighting effects. But you’ll probably be too busy focusing on the advancing baddies and their guitar licks to notice.

Rock of the Dead features jump-in/jump-out, two-player cooperative/competitive gameplay: players share lives and continues but work independently to beat each other’s scores. One player’s blue, the other purple, and the first one to hit the enemies’ fret combo gets the kill and the points. It gets pretty aggressive trying to get your strumming speed higher just so you can beat the other player. The developers anticipate a five-hour run-through with encouragement for multiple plays through thanks to its high score focus as well as its branching path towards the end of the game.

The game doesn’t feature licensed music in the same vein as Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but it’s definitely music-focused. The team commissioned bands to create "rock" versions of classical music (Public domain, anyone?) and they sound pretty good as a backdrop to the action. According to Epicenter, the team has licensed Rob Zombie/White Zombie tracks for appropriate parts of the action. And I can’t forget to mention that the team commissioned the assistance of Neil Patrick Harris himself for the character lead in Rock of the Dead, who provides the cheesy outer-monologue and one-liners. Felicia Day’s the love interest here (Neil’s partner in crime in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long), and the game’s script was handled by the writer of The Witcher.

Like Epicenter’s last game on Wii, the final product will be a "budget" release on the system, targeting a pricepoint between $30 and $40 when it ships. The game’s got about another month to go in development and then it’s up to Conspiracy to get it out on shelves. Expect a release in the late spring or early summer.