Hello Time Wasters!
This week I spent my time playing a fun little indie game (yes I know most of the games I play are indie) called Night of The Loving Dead. Besides the movie reference though what does Night of The Loving Dead have to offer?
How about a side scrolling adventure to reclaim what we’ve lost and to find the love of our life? Sounds like an interesting tale if you ask me. Our hero is dead. Left lying in a mansion for six months his soul becomes restless and he reawakens. His body is now that of a skeleton. His mind, heart and flesh are gone but his soul drives him forward.
The idea of Night of The Living Dead is to fight through waves of your undead cohorts and reclaim the missing parts of your body. Each of these parts grants an extra ability to our hero and restores some of his humanity. The main weapon of our hero is his own body. He’ll dispatch his foes by throwing his own bones at them. An example of one of his extra abilities is that retrieving his brain allows our hero to project a mental force field around himself to stop incoming attack. The force field can only sustain so much damage and using it too much will cause it to run out of energy. Luckily though it refills fairly fast.
Night of The Loving Dead takes its cue from sidescrollers of the past. Namely Castlevania and MegaMan. The eerie undead setting and attack patterns of the enemies is very reminiscent of Simon Belmont’s first adventure into the castle of Dracula. Our nameless hero on the other hand play almost exactly like the blue bomber MegaMan. His projectile and jumping patterns are almost identical and his gaining abilities from defeating foes is very similar to the formers trademark ability.
So all of this comes together to make a really fun adventure but sadly there are a few things holding it back from being as great as it could be.
To start it off the game is incredibly easy. Enemies go down easier than punching a kitten and bosses don’t offer much in the way of challenge either. Add in the total 15 minute play time and lack of any kind of replay ability and it’s easy to see that the game falls short.
I’m not saying that the game itself is bad. I like the overall concept but it needs some fine tuning before I’d be willing to give it a higher score. Maybe someday we’ll see a sequel that extends the game time and brings more of a challenge along with it.
Night of The Loving Dead earns a not too spiffy 3 GiN Gems out of 5!