#trapped dead

 Now as I was saying last time there are problems with this game. And since this one was sooo big I decided to give it as much room as I could. Now to be fair I didn't find this myself, but that doesn't change much.

See, after the umpteenth time I died on the second level (I count the hospital as the first real level, and god was that a pain to go through) you could say I had had my fill of Trapped Dead. There were just too many zombies to fight realistically. And since it was just me and Ironsides, melee wasn't a good choice and we just didn't have enough bullets.

 So, exiting the game I decided to brew in the steam's store page. I don't know why but I did. And so I started scrolling through all the negative reviews. They pretty much said the same thing, broken gameplay, blah, blah, waste of money, blah. I was getting close to being pulled under when a stray sentence caught my attention. I read it... then I read it again to make sure I had read it right. Once everything had sunk in I booted back up Trapped Dead and tried out this flaw. Then I swore out loud when I saw it was true.

 So what is this flaw? What could it be to break the game so badly? Well to put it bluntly... you can outwalk them.

 No, you read that right. I didn't say outrun, I said outwalk them. Even Ironsides, A.K.A, the dude in the wheelchair, can outwheel them!

Ignoring the amount of tense and careful time I wasted slowly crawling through the first level, timing attacks to slowly but safely clear the way to the exit, it pretty much destroyed the rest of the game.

 I mean, why slug your way through hordes of the undead when you can walk past them? Honestly, the only reason it took me a while was because I kept scavenging with a full team in case of potential bosses. Which was a major waste as it turned out. There was only one unavoidable boss fight late in the game, which I guess was only there because the programmer suddenly decided the game needed one. All I know was that it wasn't worth it and was annoyingly part of the plot.

 The boss was apparently Patient Zero, the cause of the zombie apocalypse, and who we needed to kill to be able to develop a cure.

 For some reason, Zero was given the highest amount of hit points, and while that could have been interesting Zero fought on its own and always went after Ironsides. So the epic boss battle boiled down to a game of keep-away while the rest of the party unloaded everything into Zero.

 In many ways Trapped Dead was a challenge. It required me to think, plan out routes through zombie infested levels, when to fight, how to fight, and when to run when fighting wasn't an option. Not that I'm giving the creator any credit for that. Most of it was unintentional I suspect.

 No, the main reason for this was because fighting in the game was highly unadvisible. Melee weapons (which I relied almost completely on) could only attack one zombie at a time while draining your stamina bar. And this wouldn't be too bad if killing one undead didn't take most of your stamina.

Guns weren't too bad, aside from requiring bullets. They could hit multiple targets and could be used from a distance. They also made a lot of noise, which to be fair is understandable, but were a bitch to reload in-game. If I'm remembering right, when starting a new ammo pile you'd have to do it manually by selecting the pile in your menu, dragging it to the gun, and then wait for it to reload, as instead of, say, this happening automatically. At which point a zombie would always show up and force you to flee.

 There were also throwables like blood packs and grenades, but they were so unreliable I just ignored them. I even stopped picking them up just to save backpack space. I had to save room for the melee weapons, guns, bullets, and med kits I found.

 But as exciting as this all sounds, let me assure it was not fun fighting hordes of the undead. Bullets are very few in the game, especially compared to the number of zombies, and accuracy is an issue. Mix into that the problem that most zombies   traveled in groups, and you'll get to see the game over screen more then enough times. Which in case you're wondering shows you being eaten alive.

 Honestly, the groups were the worst thing about this game. For some reason the programmer made attacking larger groups a little irksome to pull off, and some of the times that I died was trying to find the damn key I needed to press before dragging my mouse over the- blah, blah, blah. And then, of course, the next death after that would always be thanks to evil code troll deciding that I'd have to re-equip my weapon after loading up the level again. Which I have to ask, why!?

 It's bad enough that there's a bleeding effect that can happen after every zombie hit, which if left untreated will continuously bleed out gallons of blood (which does not affect the character at all btw) that attract more of the ravenous dead. I mean, god!

 But all of the this compares to the major flaw in Trapped Dead. The game breaker if you will. Hell it's the only reason I could beat the game.

At times like this, I'm stumped to think about how to finish things. It's possibly writers block, or, could just say a lot about Trapped Dead.

While trying to live up to the prime 70's zombie movie cheese it didn't actually pull through with it. Its gameplay was supposed to be a challenging struggle against the hordes of undead, and as I already said, you could avoid all of that by walking past them. Bosses? Just one and it was a push over. Secrets? None. Annoying key configurations, yes, game features and flaws that could have been ironed out, definitely. Good game?

   ...What do you think?

No, the only reason I even played it to the end was just a matter of gamer's honor, and it is neither the first or the last that I'll have to play for those reasons.

 But the really annoying part is that it is a bad game. See if it was a bland so-so game I wouldn't have even written about it. However, it's a bad game and so naturally I just had to complain about it somewhere. Complain about how every damn tell I loaded a level I had to manually re-equip the entire party. Complain about wearing down the spacebar (which paused everything) so I could plan out the routes, and micromanage each and every fight because it was safer then letting the party AI make the decisions.

God damn, I forgot how stupid the AI was. Since the game would end when just one of your team died I had to keep my eyes peeled in case zombies showed up while I was testing the route with a scout. And if wasn't for the scout, keeping him safe was easy. It was for the rest of those idiots. Why the damn programmer didn't at least make sure the party AI fought back against attacking zombies? Then one of those bastards would start bleeding and I'd have to waste bandages so it wouldn't screw up my plans, although, if no one would be at risk of losing health from that debuff, why even have that in the first place? Since the whole stupid idea is not to get hit and since you already had a way of attracting the dead by accident why put that in there.

Imeanseriouslywhatawasteoffrickingcodetojustscrewwiththeplayersothey'dhavetoreloadandthendiebecausetheyforgotthateverythingjustmagicallyunequiped!

 ...

(Cough)

 Considering how many books, movies, video games, fanfictions, toys, comics, and artwork that involve zombies, it's safe to say there's a standard set of survivors to expect in the mix. And Trapped Dead follows that to some degree.

Starting out of the gate is the out of town hero himself, a mysterious man with no backstory and who finds out about zombies by literally running into one. Naturally, this clueless idiot is how we the not so clueless audience finds out about zombies (but only if you've been living under a rock for the past twenty years) as well as "happenings" in the town. To compound the insult our hero is also a rugged goodie two shoes who has to help those in need.

Among them include the fat southern sheriff, whose backstory and character are non-existent, an anti-government gun nut sniper, ditto on backstory and character, and a hot chick. And while fanfiction may have literally fleshed her out, she's pretty much a moving cutout in the game. But to be fair they all are. No one really talks much so whatever twisted fun the creator could have had playing with these jokers is woefully missing.

Out of all of them the only one worth really talking about is the doctor, who is the second playable party member and is mean and crotchety, as one would expect a medical scientist to be. And sadly I can't remember his name.

Not that it matters. For the entire duration of my playthrough I kept thinking of him as "Ironsides", and that just stuck. Not surprising since he's confined to a wheelchair.

...

Didn't I mention the wheelchair? Well, he has a wheelchair -and no I'm not making this up!

Seriously, in many ways that's the most interesting thing about this game. In fact I don't think I've ever really seen a game where one of the main players was disabled. But to be fair, of all the interesting ideas you could work with this, making this happen in the middle of a zombie strategy game was a horrible (and darkly hilarious) mistake to make. Especially when everything is done in sort-of real time.

And yet, not only does Ironsides roll down zombie infested streets with a shotgun, his wheelchair squeaks... constantly. It kind of kills the mood. But this is just par for the course in Trapped Dead, and we're just getting started.

There plenty of cautionary tales regarding buying games on steam. And while the refund system is now securely entrenched to lessen this immensely, the fact of the matter is there are still bad games lurking in the lists, ready to grab unsuspecting buyers. At least, unsuspecting buyers who don't notice the overall reviews percentage.

 Like me.

Not knowing what to expect is all part of having new experiences, regardless if it's good or bad. And while I do try to walk in blind as much as I can, cases like Trapped Dead (among others) tend to make me overly cautious about this practice.

 The first warning sign for Trapped Dead should have been when I was given a coupon for it. Coupons are only given to people who create badges, and typically they're not for the really good and or popular games. This was something I learned over time as I bought games that met my requirements for the bigger game plan. And it was something I learned quickly.

 The second warning sign for Trapped Dead was the coupon's discount. In most cases the discount can range, but for this game it was the highest discount I had ever seen.  Somewhere around 95% off. And no, I'm not joking.

And the last one was probably ignoring that the overall reviews were negative. Not that it mattered, I didn't even read them as I bought the game and downloaded it.

 (Sigh)...

  So what is Trapped Dead all about you say? Well, this particular game is a strategy game that involves, you guessed it, zombies. The whole setting (apparently) pays homage to the classic cheesy zombie films of the golden days of 70's slock, while you and your band of misfits try to find a way out of the zombie apocalypse. Or I think that's what it is. To be honest Trapped Dead either didn't do a good job, or I haven't watched enough bad zombie movies.

 Storywise it was so generic I've really forgotten the details. Well other than a mysterious sickness wipes out most of the town, survivors scatter, random dude shows up, survivors reunite, etc. And to be honest I think that was pretty much the entire plot of the game.

 There was also really nothing interesting the characters that phased through it. They were pretty one dimensional too. Which wouldn't have been bad if they were one-dimensional in the good way. But they weren't. However, I should stop talking about them for now.

I was able to test this game before it even got released and I tested both singleplayer and multiplayer aspects of it. The multiplayer review can be seen on the video below this paragraph and it also covers visual and functional part of the game, if you're craving for a textual version, scroll a little under the video.

  Now, I haven't played the first Trapped Dead, so I can't really compare, altough I have looked at the reviews both on Steam and by external sites and authors. It did not received very good scores, mainly due to being buggy beyond an acceptable point, and generaly awful gameplay. I was curious if anything of the above has gotten better with the sequel.

    Now I will say this right from the start, it might be better than the first, but it still seriously lacks. The first one was apparently very buggy, and this trend mildly continues, the bugs were random, but there were many. In singleplayer I had some weird issues with my inventory (items that I had before, dissappearing on death and returning to checkpoint), and in multiplayer we experienced horrible missplacement issues, crashing, invisible zombies and as you could have seen in the video, I get stuck in a warehouse unable to progress at one point. This forced us to play this for the second time and switch hosts.

    The game did receive a big update after we played it for the multiplayer review and I went in to see if stuff got fixed or what was that update about -- I have no clue, since the item problems still happen for me, and I had one game crash happen.

    Visually it's “alright”. There are definitely prettier games, but to what it is (isometric “3D” rpg game) I have to say that it's absolutely enough and the game doesn't do bad with this,.

    The UI on the other hand is something absolutely horrible and I hate it. It's clunky, the game doesn't pause when you go into inventory/etc. And the whole thing is just really hard to figure out and use, since there's buttons that totally don't look like buttons (skill points) and the game is using “apply” in several parts of the UI which makes me totally forget to push it every time, since I'd not expect a feature like that.

    Speaking of skill points and such, this game is supposed to have RPG features, and I can't really say I'd be enjoying them. Character progression felt boring, nothing new or innovative, due to the UI complications it's really hard to give attention to it anyway and the overall game just felt more like an action adventure zombie slasher whith annoying rpg features.

    Story by it self is like a B-rated movie and you shouldn't expect a plot worth your brain cells,. Literally, if you're going to play this game, just expect nothing, turn your brain off, and go hack&slash some zombies. On the other hand if you do enjoy B-Rated movies, it might appeal to you a lot.

    The good part of the story is the voice acting, which is funny and adds a little humour to the game, altough sometimes I feel like the characters are talking for way too long, thankfully you can skip it. Soundtrack on the other hand is absolutely generic, can't recall any track to be stuck in my head and I believe it's 85% just ambience noise.

    I was starting to be annoyed roughly two hours into the game, level design felt like it's intentionally slowing me down, bugs, no great story, just killing zombies all the time, with weapons that go down with durability faster than you blink and a skill system so weird that you'll end up using bare fists just to not have to go into the inventory all the time. I saw about 3-4 boss fights and.. the store page claims “Diverse enemies and boss..”. That is so not true, the 4 bosses I encountered looked almost the same and acted roughly the same. That is just killing the game as well, and only adding to the annoying repetitiveness, not even talking about the repeating quests and game mechanics (“place explosive here”).

    I did had some laughs when playing it with my buddy Brandon Dayton, and I think the main selling point of this game is definitely the co-op multiplayer (so the developer better fix the issues lol) and playing this in singleplayer is just plain not worth it.

    For me this game has almost no replayability, and I will probably not be coming back to it, only if things get better (fixing the god damn UI would be enough for me to clench my teeth). It would make a good game for an iPad, as I recall having some similar games installed on it, so I could play it in the subway.

    If you're a fan of the first one (despite all the bad about it) you'll probably get this regardless of my review, and that's ok, after all its just my point of view, but I feel like it doesn't introduce much new to the series (based on my research), apart from not being tactical but a hack&slash. And with this price tag, I just have to say to everyone else.. don't buy it. Just don't. Wait for a sale, or a bundle to include it if you want it, because you'll regret spending 20 bucks. (Price tag not yet confirmed, game should be released in 2 hours)

      Pros

(+) Cool voice acting

(+) Zombies (seriously, this is enough for most people)

(+) Co-op campaign for up to 4 players

(+) Multi-platform (OS equality ftw), also XBOX ONE and PS4

    Cons

(-) Bugs, sometimes game-breaking bugs, this really shouldn't be happening..

(-) B-Movie story with typical zombie clichés

(-) Multiplayer issues, missplacement, latency, etc.

(-) Generic RPG features, that more annoy than excite

(-) Level design is gonna make you go zig-zag all the time, ehh

(-) Whole game feels very repetitive

(-) HORRIBLE UI DESIGN

(-) PRICE

    Thank you for reading this review, hope you liked it and it helped you decide. If you're fancy for some more reviews and/or other gaming content visit my youtube channel, there's a review playlist available, as well as much more. (https://www.youtube.com/user/playintosh)

Hello everybody, here’s our latest review for action RPG Trapped Dead: Lockdown by Bigmoon Studios and Headup Games.

I actually enjoyed this game quite a bit even though I’ve never been a very big fan of zombies. The game is filled with blood and gore and its action RPG gameplay was most enjoyable. 

The game is definitely a lot more fun when played with friends though as the gameplay is co-op oriented but its also pretty fun in single player.

Thanks for reading the review folks and happy gaming!