Urban dead is another zombie browser mmorpg set in a quarantined city where zombies are roaming the city and in many ways similar to Zombie Pandemic.
What makes “Urban Dead” great (besides of course being a zombie game) is its core game mechanisms and its minimalistic approach. The basic game mechanics work really well and provides a great roleplaying feeling of being in a persistent virtual world.
To be honest I was initially turned off by the oldschool “CSS button like” UI but then almost completely forgot about it once I got hooked to the idea of scavenging a good gun and wanting to level up to buy new skills to try out.
As you progress in the game you soon learn to spend points earned to enable new features though some of the features are more interesting than others providing a learning curve which is never to step and new things to look forward to.
The player versus player of Urban Dead is an aspect you probably really like or really hate. In a matter of few days I experienced losing my character and then being annoyed that I couldn’t go back to play human. Then I played around with the possibility to be zombie and really enjoyed it. Then I was away for a weekend and unable to play only to find my character player killed again. Then I came back leveled up some more and had the opportunity to player kill others players at which point I of course enjoyed the PvP again.
It’s awesome you got player vs. player action and I really liked how things could be turned around (like one day you are a human player and the next a zombie) but in the end unless you are intending to play the game continuously and somewhat hardcore the pvp can be quite frustrating.
On the other hand the constant battle between human and zombie players is the whole premise of the rich gameplay dynamic which makes the virtual world so interesting and adds to the MMORPG feeling of the game.
Another paradox is that, while the minimalistic approach is the strength of the game you soon get the feeling it’s actually its greatest limitation.
What I mean is that after a few weeks of city exploration and battling zombies, you do feel the lack of a bit more variation to the very linear approach of most things such as combat. F.x. it would be so much more interesting if had more combat choices, that accuracy could vary depending on skill and distance and there was an actual range of different handguns to choose from. Constantly having a 30% chance to hit and spending all your daily action points to hit your opponent with no variance becomes a bit trivial after a while.
However Urban Dead still deserves a great recommendation from our staff. Check it out at www.urbandead.com