If you already have a soft spot for Stubbs the Zombie, you’re going to have a perfectly fine experience here. There's a two-player mode, too, if you want to share the pain. It’s a well-ported, smooth version of a game that wasn’t good when it originally released and has aged like milk.

It’s a game that, in 2021, has really got nothing going for it besides any nostalgia you may already have. It has character for sure, but it’s irritating. There are cutscenes, but they’re not funny. You’re wrestling with the mechanics throughout, munching brains in unskippable cod animations until you’re able to use one of the four powers (two of which are basically useless), then trying to figure out where to go next until the handy waypoint appears and directly shows you. It’s not prudishness – it simply isn’t funny enough.Īnd that’s all it is, really. It’s the kind of decision that seems to inform the rest of the “comedy”. And not the funny kind of out-there gonzo unpleasantness you’d see in the likes of The House of the Dead: Overkill or No More Heroes just ugly, mean-spirited nastiness. The ghoulish horror of munching innocent peoples’ brains is amusingly vivid, but having the people scream “I HAVE A WIFE AND KIDS” as you murder them swings the proceedings sharply into unpleasantness. The attempts at comedy registered to us as wide misfires, but – say it with us – your mileage may vary. It’s a fractured, confusing game that feels more like a proof of concept than a complete entity of its own.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) We’d argue it’s not a great sign when the central concept of your game – being a zombie – is less entertaining than your bog-standard shooting, but Stubbs feels like a flawed premise to begin with. Blasting away with your possessed soldier or whoever makes the game into a more conventional third-person shooter, though not exactly a great one. It’s here that Stubbs the Zombie is at its best – depressingly, whenever you’re not playing as Stubbs. You’ll later be able to throw “grenades” made out of exploding organs, roll your head along like a bowling ball and – most interestingly – possess other characters, allowing you to take control of them to help turn the tables. At the start you just have a ( ho, ho) flatulence ability that causes Stubbs to unleash an almighty Bronx cheer, stunning every human in the stench radius and making them easy fodder for a grey matter platter. Thought-noshing, you see, is the way you replenish your health and various zombie powers that are acquired as you make your way through the game.

Stubbs the zombie