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A mad scientist is pumping music through the decaying state rooms of Buckingham Palace: William Byrd, whose distinctly English compositions effortlessly conjure a Renaissance world of precision and calm, a realm of serene order. But there's something else being carried on the air, too. Simple chords - lumpen, plodding, arrhythmic. Somewhere nearby, a zombie is playing the piano.ZombiU was a dark and ragged delight when it appeared as part of the Wii U's launch line-up: a zombie survival game that made the genre feel fresh again. Ubisoft Montpellier sought to take corpse-runs and weighty, punishing first-person combat and apply it to London during the apocalypse, a city of tobacco browns and ashtray greys, viewed through an oily Thames-slick lens. All of this was narrated by the Prepper, a no-nonsense ex-soldier whose safe-house at Shadwell Tube gave you respite from the shambling undead and whose grim, paranoid, mocking observations regarding everything from the monarchy to the state's attitude to migrants provided the perfect end-of-the-world director's commentary. Clever stuff: as the Prepper despatched you on a series of tasks that took you deep into the over-run city, the map unlocked at an ideal pace and the splinters of cramped geography started to fit together in your mind. The zombies were slow and puny in ones and twos, but could overwhelm in packs and were surprisingly quick to capitalise on mistakes. Die, and you respawned as a new Londoner, with a new CV (general manager, barrister, consultant). A new Londoner whose first mission was generally to track down the last new Londoner so as to cave their head in and steal back their supplies.
All of this was enlivened by the kind of wit that lets a zombie loose in the queen's music room, and by platform-specific tricks that made ZombiU deeply endearing. The second screen was seemingly everything here, since the development team was eager to leave you disempowered and vulnerable as much as possible. Minimap? Stuck on the GamePad, mate, so you'd have to look away from the screen whenever you wanted to get your bearings. Inventory? Same place, and you'd be out of luck if you expected a pause while you were hunting around for a new weapon or a medpack. Scanning the surroundings and hacking used the GamePad, too, except here you had to hold it up in front of the TV and peer about with it, hoping you'd discover what you were after before the horde got to you. ZombiU properly made that pad sing.
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