Zombie Revenge

Despite releasing a couple years prior, Zombie Revenge pioneered Devil May Cry’s signature bullet juggling, all the way down to the enemy splaying out in the air as they bounce. In Zombie Revenge’s case, the rigid combo system with minimal interruptible frames makes the gun mandatory for linking strings, especially since it’s the most reliable OTG in your arsenal, and almost every full string forces a knockdown. It’s not merely a tool for styling on enemies either; it takes good timing to shoot a downed enemy in the window where they’ll pop back up for a juggle, as the game removes the property after a period of time or a failed attempt, and spacing the followup can be vexing depending on where they landed. Also unlike Devil May Cry, there’s an actual ammo system at play here with no manual reloading, so timing combos to fall earlier in your clip is essential. Tack on a substantial movelist with options for interrupt points, differently sized hitboxes, juggle/knockdown setups, and redirectable followups, and you’ve got a rather expressive combat engine for a game of its era.

However, much like the much maligned Devil May Cry 2 (and even reasonably good imitators like that PS2 game Van Helsing), an overpowered gun can marginalize hand-to-hand experimentation. Gunshots deal different amounts of damage depending on how long your aim is held, with a hemispherical reticle over your target’s head showing a dilating cursor to illustrate where you’re at in the damage scaling (it’s color-coded as well). Your combos are potent for sure, but they require getting up close and personal, whereas you can deal similar amounts of damage with single shots from the pistol if you wait in place at range. Bosses more or less mandate this, as the second half of each fight has each gain a counterhit every time they’re attacked that also enables superarmor; you can overcome this… if you rapid-fire with the pistol. In these cases shot tempo has a role for balancing between quick shots to put bosses in stun and slower shots to maximize damage, but once you’ve learned the tempo for each boss you’ll rarely have to do much except block attacks and run away occasionally. At best you’ll have to maintain dwindling ammo reserves from over-reliance on the pistol, but in practicality virtually every enemy drops a clip, and bosses drop four clips at once at health thresholds, so you’re rarely punished for expending shot after shot.

The third boss, UDS-05, has electrical attacks, but for some reason they can be blocked. Additionally, its second phase counterhit has a start-up that can be interrupted. Thus, the whole fight is stunlocking the monster with correctly paced bullets and then occasionally blocking.

Almost every person who 1CCs this plays Linda, who has pretty atrocious recovery frames on her built-in combos but has a dash attack with a nicely sized knockdown hitbox.¹ The actual meat of the game ends up being rotating knockdowns and taking max damage shots on whoever is grounded, since the speed of the damage scaling increases when grounded or re-locking after combos. Most of that first paragraph I discovered playing primary protagonist Stick, whose dash attack has a stinger-like forward impulse on it but with a hitbox so small it will frequently whiff on enemies directly in front of you. The sooner I moved away from actually experimenting with the combo system and settled for the knockdown-to-headshot loop, the sooner I started making significant progress, but it’s a bummer it had to end up this way. The knockdown loops are the heart of beat-’em-ups, but usually you have to manage enemy grouping to avoid staggering wake-ups at close range, whereas Zombie Revenge encourages standing in place and picking off whoever is stuck in wake-up or idle states between attacks. The one cool feature is the held shot, which has a long startup but switches to a Resident Evil-style aim with a long straight-ahead shot that pierces through enemies, giving a cool new twist on crowd control that favors lining enemies up as much as bunching them together.

Still, the game isn’t remotely easy. Every attack in the entire game (including stage hazards like low-hanging girders on the train stage) deals poison damage healable only with antidote herbs dropped by enemies. Getting too poisoned will cause your character to limp and strip away their dash, making its all-important knockdown-inducing attack inaccessible. Certain enemies also tote guns themselves, with a shotgun blast easily eating over half a bar of health on its own. Blocking trumps many attacks until the late game but is directional, making it less ideal when cornered where enemies will consistently gank you. Enemy counts generally fall around four in an area but up to eight at once isn’t uncommon either, sometimes in tight hallways where whiffing a dash attack and missing a set of knockdowns can result in a quick gashing. Likely the most difficult enemy are hatchet-wielding imps, not only because they are exceedingly agile and can hit from the air, but because they litter said hatchet items all over the place; pressing any attack over a grounded weapon will lock you in place to pick it up. Astute players can easily control enemies with experience, as ranged attacks have long wind-ups, and enemies with weapons will generally prioritize recovering their lost weapons instead of attacking, but depending on the encounter a miscalculation can easily veer into instant death.

Destroying these crates gives you weapons and a life boost for the next encounter against a couple of imps. The unbroken crate has a land mine and a stungun; I usually drop the land mine at the start of the fight and let the imps kill themselves. Right after that, you can grab a flamethrower that trivializes the next encounter… and so on.

It’s variable how much of this I view as actually badly designed or merely frustrating (other issues, such as the frighteningly contextual soft-lock auto-aim, are pretty obviously weak), but I would have rather the game tone down the lethality instead of their solution: equippable weapons. The hatchets do little, but other weapons – specifically the land mine, the grenade, and the chain gun – show up in specific areas to effectively turn off encounters, including some bosses. Even the regular machine guns and shotguns you can pick up off of normal enemies will turn crowd control into “press the spray-and-pray button” moments with minimal other interaction. Weapon routing ends up taking over the game, squashing a significant number of encounters into knowledge checks. If they had dialed back the intensity a little (or buffed up the regular moveset) and then removed a lot of the weapons, I might have a more positive perception.