If Xbox Live was a city, the Indie Games section would be its Chinatown. It’s exciting, it’s weird, and most of the stuff you find on sale is either a bootleg copy or a serious copyright violation of other very well-known intellectual properties. But once in a while, you stumble upon an elderly gentleman selling legit-looking DVDs of The Walking Dead for a steal in a shady back alley. In this terrible metaphor, Dead Pixels: An 8-Bit Zombie Sim is that gem.
Campaign: AH! ZOMBIES!… Again…
Dead Pixels‘ story doesn’t stray far from the standard zombie storytelling formula. Toxic waste is accidentally dumped into the water supply of New Hexington, NY, which causes the recently deceased to rise from their graves. Everyone killed by the undead joins their ranks. With most of the population dead or zombified, a group of survivors hatch a plan to the city by getting to the airport and flying out. It’s up to you (and a buddy) to blast your way through streets packed with zombies.
Yes, it’s not the most original plot out there, but unless your name is George A. Romero, you don’t get to call your zombie project “original” anymore.
Gameplay: River City Ransom meets Left 4 Dead
For readers unfamiliar with River City Ransom, it’s a classic NES beat-em-up that incorporated RPG elements (stats-building, item buying, etc.). Dead Pixels follows the same premise. You shoot your way through hordes of increasingly-tougher zombies (including boss zombies), collecting cash, loot buildings for items, and buy or sell items at shops. The game randomly generates levels each time you play, so no playthrough is ever the same as another.
There are four main types of weapons that players can use in Dead Pixels, each color-coded to correspond with the correct ammo type. Red weapons are shotguns, blue weapons are semi-auto pistols and rifles, green weapons are full-auto guns, and yellow weapons are fire-based weapons. Thrown weapons also come in handy when clusters of zombies block the only way out. Weapons and ammo are found by looting homes and businesses or buying them at traders, but you can melee zombies if you run out of ammo. Since zombies respawn indefinitely and ammo does not, the game encourages you to play smart, and decide when you need to run past zombies or shoot them.
The RPG elements are pretty basic. You can level up your character’s health, carrying limit, damage, luck and other stats by purchasing upgrades at traders. Traders also sell items that can be used to heal or buff your character or distract zombies.
Dead Pixels supports local co-op (no Xbox Live functionality), so you and a friend can team up and tackle the game together. The game becomes a lot more fun when you thrown in a second player. Players can trade weapons, ammo and items with one another, looting buildings turns up twice as much loot, and boss fights become a bit easier. If one player dies, his character will become zombified and attack the other player, but reaching a trader will revive him with all his weapons, ammo, items and money.
There are 3 difficulty levels, Easy, Normal, and Hard, which don’t actually change the game’s core difficulty, but rather how many streets you need to pass. Easy ends at 10, Normal at 20, and Hard at 30. By playing solo or with a friend, a Normal or Hard game shouldn’t take more than 2 hours.
Presentation: 8-bit Grindhouse
The first thing you’ll notice about Dead Pixels‘ presentation is that it looks like an old NES 8-bit title. So don’t expect Skyrim-levels of graphics, but the 8-bit nostalgia factory definitely works to the game’s charm. It also plays around with a “Grindhouse”-style presentation, from the film grain effect muddying up the graphics, hard rock soundtrack, and (optional) narrated intermission slide that appears at the halfway point in each game. Dead Pixels also includes references to other zombie-themed titles, such as Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil, and Evil Dead. My favorite callback was the reference to Resident Evil, where Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata plays during the trade menu.
Gamers Leak Recommendation: Buy it
It’s pretty hard to muck up a game about zombies (though it certainly is possible), but given the saturation of zombie titles in the market nowadays, it’s also difficult to make one that’s actually kind of fun. Not only has Can’t Strafe Right Studios developed a hit, they’ve promised free DLC updates for every sale milestone they reach. Their first milestone, 4000 sales, has already been reached and the studio is working The Solution, a scenario that takes place after events in the campaign. At 10000 sales, CSR will release Last Stand, which, as the name suggests, adds an infinite survival mode. Dead Pixels is available on Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 Microsoft Points (1 USD in real life), so there’s really no excuse for you not to buy this. As with all indie games, Dead Pixels has a trial version if you want to try before you buy, so go check it out.
