A one-note one-liner.
A decade ago when the first Zombieland hit theaters, it was during a time where Zombies were once again hitting a high in pop culture. The Resident Evil movies were killing it at the box office, and The Walking Dead TV series was gearing up to just about start production. The movie, starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin was not a bad flick, adding some humor to the often grim and violent zombie genre. With the release of Zombieland 2 in theatres late last year, a twin-stick shooter called Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip was released alongside the film, acting as a prequel of sorts, a game that at its best, is still a disappointing experience that fails to deliver at every turn.
The entirety of the game’s story is based around the group making their way from L.A. to D.C. to hit the White House in favor of Tallahassee running for office, or something along those lines as the story here is instantly forgettable. There are several moments where the group will banter back and forth, but the writing and the delivery of their lines borders from cringe to eye-rolling. While they were able to snag Abigail Breslin, the actress who portrayed Little Rock in the films, the rest of the group are voiced by sound-a-likes who rarely ever get the voice of the character just right, with the exception of whoever voiced Emma Stone’s Wichita who at least got her tone right. I tried to find out who voiced these characters, but not even the game’s credits or IMDB listed them.
As you work your way across the US, you’ll make a stop at 10 different locations, as well as a handful of side missions that should keep you busy for about 3-4 hours at most. These include an amusement park, a grocery store, a pair of escort missions for some old lady, and even a mission designed solely around finding one of the characters a bathroom. I’m not making this up. Most levels last maybe 15-20 minutes and the game only really offered any type of challenge around its 9th level, mainly because of the amount of narrow pathing that prevents you from having a lot of space to move around. This is made even worse in multiplayer as the distance you can be away from your teammates is shockingly small. While you can play through the short campaign with up to four people, trying to find even one additional person to stomach this experience alongside me felt like I was submitting them to sheer torture.
The game also packs in a horde mode, but the few levels available and the repeated objectives for each wave make this a very one and done experience. Each level pretty much repeats the same “kill zombies” or “destroy nests” or “survive for 2-minute” objectives as they repeat with higher numbers. The only thing that horde mode offers that is helpful in any way is by helping you gain quick experience to level up your characters and increase a few of their stats to make them more effective. Each location has you taking on 25 waves that increase in challenge the more you progress, usually.
The game attempts to inject the same kind of humor the movies are known for, but honestly, there isn’t a single good joke, one-liner, or gag that isn’t cringy or played into the ground. Characters will spout off one-liners, but as they are specific to certain situations that the game repeats ad nauseam, you’ll hear the same line of dialogue dozens of times each level. Each chapter starts off with a bit of dialogue, and while you can skip each line on its own, replaying a level after you’ve died or to level up your characters, forces you to have to skip it line by line again, as opposed to a skip-all function. There are also story moments where dialogue is unskippable, and since there are zero checkpoints, you’ll hear these lines over and over again as you reattempt levels.
Controls here feel oddly oversimplified and made me wonder if the title was originally going to be a mobile game. You have the left stick for moving, the right to aim your gun, and the RT for shooting. You open car trunks and gun crates with RB and reload with LB. You can activate your special ability with LB+RB, and their effect varies from character to character. You can also lob grenades or molotov’s with LT, but aiming them with the right analog stick can often make you accidentally lob them in a direction you don’t want. Considering there is an achievement for setting yourself and some enemies on fire with your own molotov, I’m guessing the developers knew how bad it was from the start. For as often as you get trapped near hordes of zombies, I’m surprised that there isn’t a dash or roll since the face buttons themselves are only used for menus and serve no purpose in the game itself. Some enemies have a far-reaching area attack that is impossible to get out of the way if you get too close, something that would have been avoidable if the game had a dodge or roll maneuver.
Weapons themselves are your basic affair with a default pistol as your go-to gun from the start of the level. From there you can check various containers in the level for SMG’s, assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, a minigun, and then dual-wielding both the pistol and the SMG. While you’ll aim with the right stick as you move around, typical of a twin-stick shooter, the aiming feels very imprecise and this is likely due to either hit-boxes being very small, or some other technical aspect I’m unaware of. Because of this, the pistol can often miss when you have a zombie right in your face. To combat this in some ways, you do have access to melee weapons, but they overwrite your gun-based weapons instead of letting you equip it and a gun. Considering there are so many times you’ll get swarmed and die when rushed during a reload, it would have really helped the game out to have that melee ability a constant assist for those types of moments. I will say that the katana and the dual SMG’s can be entertaining, but that’s mainly because they tend to work better than anything else in the game by leaps and bounds.
Characters have special abilities such as Little Rock earning back her health with a moment of invulnerability, or Wichita leaving a clone of herself that yells at enemies to come in close before it explodes. As you mow down zombie hordes, you’ll earn special ability energy that will allow you to use those moves, which can often prove useful, especially Wichita’s clone that I would use to lure enemies towards environmental kill zones such as turning on a spinning crane or activating the blades of a helicopter, which for some reason has its switch on the outside.
The overall gameplay results in you reaching the final location of each level, by killing zombies, finding keys, opening doors, and tackling objectives like destroying zombie-generating nests like porta-potties or swat vans. Most levels take maybe 15-20 minutes and don’t really feel like they have a satisfying set-piece or structure to them. Levels feel almost procedurally generated and don’t have the layout of something that feels handcrafted. The zombies themselves feel equally uninspiring as you have the typical fast zombies, exploding zombies, and those that can spew vomit across a vast distance. Each unique zombie has its own intro, but much like the rest of the game, the presentation here feels painful in its simplicity and feels like it was designed by someone who just started using Adobe illustrator that morning.
Overall, Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip is not a good looking game at all and feels like something rushed out to market. While their zombies look like zombies, their human cast looks almost as undead as the threats they are looking to gun down. The game also does that weird thing where only your character is highlighted when they pass behind an object in the environment, but the enemies themselves do not, making it far too easy for something to jump you and you’ll have no idea what’s there untill you move away or see your health drop.
Enemies often come from nests like porta-potties or swat vans, as I’ve mentioned, but I’ve also seen them simply crawl out of the ground or pop out through walls. I’ve had guns not fire, I’ve gotten stuck in the environment at least three times, and the final encounter of the last mission wouldn’t complete once I took down the final horde, forcing me to reboot the level and replay it again. I’ve already mentioned that co-op has this weird tether that won’t let you get too far apart from your teammates and I can’t tell you how many times one of us has died as a result. The game is also only local co-op, so those hoping for some online play will have to look elsewhere.
With Xbox having a free weekend trial of the game, I pushed through the entire selection of modes and the full campaign in just a few hours and despite the game being “free” with my gold subscription for the weekend, I almost feel ripped off. While the game is currently on sale, its regular price of 39.99 USD or 51.99 CAD is an absolute insult for what you get here. If this game joins the catalog of Game Pass titles, then sure, knock yourself out, but I really can’t recommend paying anything for this absolute waste of time.
Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip was downloaded by the reviewer and played on an Xbox One X during a free weekend event.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.