ZombieVital DG

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

ZombieVital DG is a Management Simulation released on PC in 2015 as Dungeon Manager ZV, ported to mobile devices in 2017 under its original Japanese title ZombieVital DG, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021 under that title as well. In this game, players design and manage their own RPG-style Dungeon, aiming to make it challenging while keeping players entertained.

The presentation here is laughably bad – player-characters and dungeon monsters are represented here by animated letters representing those characters (“K” for “Knight”, “Z” for “Zombie”, and so on), with the dungeon itself being a flat expanse of brown. The only vaguely bright spot in the visuals is the way the dungeon deforms nicely as you “dig” it out of the Earth. These visuals are backed by a droning, repetitive soundtrack.

However, a Management Simulation isn’t about the presentation, right? It’s all about the options and the joy of creating and controlling something! And in that regard… well, in that regard, this game is also pretty terrible. The localization is horrendous and difficult to understand, and it’s difficult to wrap your head around how to make your dungeon effective at building up the players’ enjoyment while also collecting resources from their downed corpses. Inevitably, you’ll end up either steamrolling over the heroes, or they’ll steamroll over your monsters. There’s little joy in building up your dungeon either – you don’t really build different types of architecture or anything like that, it’s more like you’re tunneling a cave than creating a manmade structure.

However, even in the basic details, this game fails. Make the path go through a cave and station a monster there, and the monster and heroes might end up ignoring each other entirely. And one or both may very well end up getting themselves stuck in the scenery, or even somehow plunging into the presumably solid rock that forms the walls of your dungeon cave. It would be outright laughable if it wasn’t so very disappointing.

It’s a shame things had to turn out this way – it would have been great to have a game like Dungeon Keeper or Tecmo’s Deception on Nintendo Switch, a game where you can craft your own dungeon to fend off heroes. And ZombieVital DG’s approach of trying to build a dungeon to keep heroes entertained was similarly promising. Unfortunately, this game does pretty much nothing right – it’s visually ugly, doesn’t give players many options, has terrible pathfinding, features an atrociously poor localization, and ultimately I found myself at a loss as to why to even keep playing this game. Don’t make the mistake of buying this – this dungeon only houses despair… and not the fun kind.

tl;dr – ZombieVital DG is a Management Simulation where players craft their own dungeon to challenge and entertain heroes that venture into it. It’s a fun premise, but this game fails to deliver on that premise in any meaningful way, with terrible visuals, an abysmal localization, broken mechanics and pathfinding, and a lack of options for players looking to craft their own custom dungeon. Do not waste your money on this absolute mess of a game.

Grade: F

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