Multiplayer
The games multiplayer mode allows you to play co-operatively with three other friends through any of the games locations. This was a thrilling mode to play because you were able to focus almost your entire attention to your player’s strengths and weaknesses. This allowed for a definite different mentality from that of singleplayer, but still required you pay attention to your teammates in order to survive together.
Ambiance (graphics and sound)
Game graphics were surprisingly great and eerie for what I was expecting from an indie developer, as you can see from the screenshots the scenarios were crisp and clear and the attention to detail in the different locations was very well thought out. Surprising’ly enough I even tried this out using Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology and it worked wonders with only a few shadow flickers causing problems.
Sound was interesting and ghoulish enough with the unearthly moans and grunts coming from the undead. There were also plenty of sounds of zombies feeding on the former living which added to enjoyment of the game and kept the mood of that of an 80’s horror film. The weapon sounds were not as realistic as weapon recordings can be, but on the other hand you could definitely hear the sound of brains exploding as you annihilated the undead with your bat or performed a critical headshot.
WeakPoints
One of my main desires was to have more key bindings for several options, and all my mouse buttons. it did give you the ability to choose an individual character by using the f1 keys, but there was no key to auto select all members in the group requiring the drag with mouse option most of the time.
Some of the gameplay was composed of the path of least resistance I would have liked to see some way to make players desire to search out every part of each location and kill every last zombie.
I did experience some small bugs in the release, such as a save point not actually correctly saving and forcing you reload from the save before it, and some instances of slow reactions to which enemies you clicked to attack. That being said, it’s important to remember this is an indie game and thus they had fewer resources to work with it. All in all these were minor issues and hindrances in the gameplay that I’m sure can and probably will be addressed in upcoming patches.
Overall Impression
All in all, Trapped Dead was a refreshing RTS game, with a roller coaster ride of drama, humour, and action throughout. I definitely enjoyed the fact that it took strategy and not just blank-minded shooting at targets to make it through each level. If you’re a RTS fan and especially a zombie fan I think the 19.95 price is a small price to pay to entertain yourself with a good mixture of the two.
