Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green for Xbox Reviews by Gamers

Based on the brain-splattering film released last June, Brainbox Game's Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green attempts to re-create the gooier aspects of the live-action feature as a first person shooter.

You'll be playing as Jack, a farmer living on the outskirts of Fiddler's Green. Through the course of the game, you'll battle through swarms of the undead and eventually team up with another survivor named Otis to try and make your way to safety.

For those not familiar with the film, Fiddler's Green is a city set up by Mr. Kaufman protected from the throngs of mindless brain-munching pedestrians. The game begins with Jack standing in a room on the top floor of Mr. Kaufman's building in the center of Fiddler's Green, then flashes back to how he got there.

The flashback shows Jack in at home on his farm when the power suddenly goes out. He notices a stranger standing in his yard staring at his barn. Instead of immediately deciding the stranger was a zombie, which anyone who knows anything about horror movies would and should do, Jack decides to go find out what's wrong with the interloper. Surprise, it's a zombie. You'll need to run Jack up to his attic, grab his gun, then blast your way through a mess of fly-covered sauntering corpses to escape your homestead.

Once you get away from your place you decide to check on the neighbors. On your way, you'll have to blast and smash through more shambling dead things only to find your neighbors have been killed. Afterwards, you fight more zombies. This sequence featured one section where you guide Jack through a cornfield. The corn stalks have grown to heights above your head and they're so thick you can't see more than a few feet in front of you. As you may expect, you'll get blindsided by zombies, who you should promptly dispatch by eliminating their foreheads via lots of bullets. It was definitely the highlight of the section we played.

You'll gain access to a bunch of different tools to mow down your groaning, slow moving enemies. At the game's outset players can get a hold of a .22 rifle and a revolver. Surprisingly, it was the revolver that does the most damage, blowing off undead arms and heads. The rifle, on the other hand, took at least four rounds to drop one of your rotting foes, even with shots directly to the cranium. The shovel took even longer, requiring at least five to six swings.

Zombies display some rag-doll physics, flipping and flopping to the ground after eating enough bullets. Depending on what weapon you use, they'll fly further or flip more often. For instance, a shotgun blast will spin your foes into a mid-air somersault while the rifle will just cause them to collapse to the side. In addition to blasting faces and arms to a bloody mist, it's also possible to blow off legs and set your enemies on fire.

The rest of your arsenal consists of a glock, shotgun, sniper rifle, M-16, and some Molotov cocktails. The glock basically acts as a rifle with a faster rate of fire and takes out single brain munchers fairly quickly. The sniper rifle is the most powerful, acting like a long range shotgun, punching zombies backwards and making them flail uselessly about as they flop towards their second death. The M-16 is definitely the most fun to use, capable of blowing off just about every undead appendage in around three seconds.

Land of the Dead supports Xbox Live, allowing players to take the splatterfest online. The game's four modes include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Invasion which can be played across 10 different maps. On each map you can set time limits, score limits as well as enemy difficulty level, which indicates there may be some form of cooperative online play. In the build we saw the Live features were yet to be implemented, so we'll have to report to you later on exactly how good the online version of undead eradication is.

It was clear the graphics had yet to be finished in the preview build we were sent since many of the game's textures were blurred or missing. The shovel would occasionally turn pink and some zombies sported rainbow colored clothing, which we're going to assume isn't normal, unless zombies have suddenly started making fashion statements.

The actual zombie models ranged from bloody grandmothers to creeps with plenty of missing flesh. Sounds included creepy ambient noise and piano plinks, but these too sounded as if they were still due to undergo some changes as well.

Though there's certainly some work to be put into this zombie shooter before it's released this October, it looks as though it could pull through as an enjoyable, splatter-filled experience. Keep checking IGN for more.

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