Zombie Stumbles-Trapped Dead Review

Trapped Dead is a PC game which regretfully leaves the gamer wondering if the title is meant to refer to the zombies, the protagonists, or the player.   The game initially gives the appearance of being something unique- a zombie themed RTS which incorporates teamwork gameplay, the ability to control multiple units solo or as a group, and what looks to be parody of old zombie movies.  Sounds great, right?  However, it isn’t  long after the game begins before the player begins either to feel trapped or end up dead– or both.

Trapped Dead is not without merit. The game starts out with a cool display of film reel style shots, putting the player in the mood for what looks to be an entertaining, if not somewhat kitchy, artistic style.  The plot is not entirely original; two college friends driving across country run out of gas in a bad (read zombie filled) part of the country, and have to get fuel from a nearby gas station.  Thus we encounter the first zombie, and the beginning of the friends campy dialogue regarding these strange “things” walking around.  Your friend gets bitten, of course, and the new mission/ true beginning of the game’s action becomes finding a hospital.  

 When you get to the hospital, you leave your friend in the car, bleeding to death from a spurting neck wound, and head out on your own, looking for a doctor.  What you encounter is a hospital full of zombies munching down on some good ol’ corpse flesh.  You must make your way through the hospital, ever hopeful in the search for a doctor who is still alive.  As you go, you pass set pieces which demonstrate an obvious and pleasing attention to detail.  Light and shadow are well rendered, and the mix of good light rendering and detailed set pieces create a compelling ambiance.  The visceral sounds of crunching bone and tearing flesh that you hear any time you mouse over or near a zombie also deliver a creepy feel to the game.  The voice acting, for the most part, is well done in terms of creating a sense of urgency and fear; the conversation you have with the doctor does a great job amping up these feelings, and demonstrates how much of an impact the voice acting can have on the game.  In these areas, Trapped Dead proves successful at creating a playable and compelling atmosphere.

However, from this point forward Trapped Dead begins to encounter game-crippling problems, and lose any mounting charm.  As soon as you gain the second character to play with, new some issues arise.  For example, giving weapons to teammates is a simple grab and drag action from inventory to character icon- yet half the time the swap is prohibited.  Standing right next to your teammate, you will sometimes encounter a “too far away” message, but the rest of the time it works fine. Woefully, glitches like these soon become ubiquitous, cause core game mechanics to work unreliably. In fact, almost the only consistent thing about the game is its inconsistency.  Attack commands seem to fall on deaf ears some of the time, with the result being that your character(s) gets mauled.  This is a problem because there is no option to heal during the level.  Though you start with fresh health and the beginning of each level/stage, during the level you have no options to heal at all.  You are only able to use med kits to stop bleeding, not heal yourself. Which is funny considering you have a doctor in your party.  Apparently he failed the practicum parts of medical school, because he does nothing for you.  

I appreciate the game’s attempt at realism. If you were really running around in a town full of zombies, you wouldn’t be able to “heal” only bandage wounds- you would be compelled to use traps so as to avoid direct contact as much as possible. You would want to find ways to isolate zombies, as packs of them can be dangerous, even when they’re slow moving. Guns don’t always come with ammunition, so you have to find it separately.  These are all elements that the game attempts to utilize to make the game feel more like a potentially real scenario. And it would be great, were it not for the lack of forethought and inconsistent controls.  

It’s not just the occasional deafness to active commands. The game makes a point of telling you to use the pause feature to take advantage of giving your characters different orders.  However, only some actions work when one comes out of pause mode. This again, often leads to your characters getting munched.  So to, does the fact that, while melee attacks are continuous until the enemy dies, gun attacks are not.  Your wheelchair-bound doc has to be told to fire each and every time he takes a shot at a zombie, another leads-to-munching problem. Oh yeah, did I mention that? The doctor character is in a wheelchair.

This is another area in which the game attempted to be unique, but failed in appreciating what it would mean to have characters with disabilities, without doing anything to compensate for them.  The wheelchair doctor can’t make it up stairs, and can’t use any melee weapons.  That makes perfect sense, and is a cool idea in terms of character variety.  However, it translates into a quagmire; if the shoot-able trap is up the stairs, but the doctor can’t make it up there and if I leave him without a weapon to go use the trap alone, he’s going to be defenseless zombie food.  

Well let’s look at the varying stamina system.  That’s another unique feature; characters have different stamina depending on who they are.  So the fat sheriff has less stamina than the others.  However, running AND attacking both take down stamina, without which you can’t do either, and the stamina bar is slow to refill.  The sheriff doesn’t really do more damage, so he’s at a disadvantage to attack and flee, with nothing to compensate for those deficiencies.  And even though he starts with a gun in the cell next to his (odd that he’d throw his gun into a different jail cell than the one he’s in), which would allow him to maintain distance from zombies, there’s no ammunition in the gun. Or near it. Or anywhere in the whole level.  No problem, I’ll just give him the pistol my doctor is using…oh wait, I can’t because he can’t use melee weapons.  Oh look, a double barrel shotgun near the end of the level….with no ammunition…again.  

So I’ve got a sheriff who can’t run and has no ammo for any guns, a doctor who can’t use any melee weapons because he needs to man his wheelchair, and a main character who can do most everything except use a shotgun (he’s apparently a weakling).  But none of your characters can die, or else you have to start the level over.  Now what’s realistic about that?  So here’s where the game totally falls apart.

The combination of bugs and glitches that hamper your character, an attempt at realism that leaves you more vulnerable to death, and a huge lack in the elements that are meant to help you avoid this vulnerability (the “traps” you are meant to use only show up about once per level, and the only ammo I’ve found is for the pistol), amounting to a game that is frustrating and isn’t fun to play.     

In an effort to be fair to a newish developer who were trying hard for a big type of game, I tried to research the bugs online for fixes.  I didn’t find any, but what I did find was a smattering of other reviews of the game, all reporting bugs.  But the flaws I found reported in other reviews were different and just as game breaking, if not more so, than the ones I encountered in my play through.  This means the game is so full of bad coding even the bugs are inconsistent.  The final straw in a game filled with blunders came after the jail level.  Players are offered the ability to play levels in whatever order they think most important, but I was unable to explore this element because after the jail level the “Launch” button became permanently grayed out. In an attempt to address this problem, I played with menu options, clicking every available menu button option, resetting the game, and ensuring the latest patch was installed- all to no avail.  I finally gave up on playing.

Trapped Dead is a game that dreams of being well detailed and realistic, and managed to leave the design department with the makings of just that, but got short changed in the coding department, and left overall as a buggy, damaged, hope of a game.  As excited as I was in anticipation of a zombie game which would provide some ingenuity and novelty to the zombie game genre, given all the short sightedness and coding problems, I have to give this game a low grade.  The only reason it doesn’t fail entirely is because it attempted to be innovative in a genre that’s become a bit redundant, and the designers paid great attention to light and shadow detail and to the set pieces.  All in all, Trapped Dead is a great idea that suffers from a serious lack of attention to game design and coding.