Corridor Z

Genre: Auto-Runner / Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Mass Creation Double Action Bundle along with Shing!, as well as Double Action Bundle: Shing & Corridor Z along with Shing! Yes, both bundles contain the same two games, but were released by different publishers.)

Corridor Z is a in-front-of-the-character Auto-Runner that’s loosely similar to games like the Temple Run series, although it approaches the genre a bit differently. Here, players aren’t moving from one path to another to dodge obstacles. Rather, they’re responding quickly to objects appearing nearby them as they rush towards the screen as they evade an ever-onrushing horde of zombies chasing them through a school’s corridors. This game was originally released on mobile devices in 2015, and has since been ported to multiple other platforms, with the Nintendo Switch getting the game in 2020.

Corridor Z has some decent but unimpressive 3D visuals that get the job done and create the right sort of atmosphere for the game, preserving both the horror elements of the zombie genre while also giving the game a tongue-in-cheek feel of a school parody, with players collecting pages from classmates’ diaries, fending off the zombified football team, and overall with the game not taking itself too seriously and forcing gamers to wonder just why the game’s central three characters keep running endless circuits in the school instead of actually trying to get out of it. This is underlined by decent voice acting and music that seems to over-emphasize the peril of the absurd situation.

In terms of gameplay, like many games of this genre, this is fairly simple, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Players press left or right on the D-pad or control stick when running by debris to toss it in onrushing zombies’ path, press up to grab hanging debris to do the same, press in the direction of supplies like weapons or food to grab them, press left or right to turn when the hallway goes in that direction, and presses one of the buttons to fire off a gun at the oncoming zombies if they have one. Players who miss opportunities to slow down the zombies or take too long to turn at a bend in the corridor will be overtaken by zombies, and must expend food to fend them off. There are goals to accomplish and upgrades to earn, as well as a few surprises sprinkled in to add variety, but for the most part this is the gist of the game.

It all mostly works pretty well, but there are a few problems. Firstly, the fact that players are racing towards the screen often means they have less time to react to things appearing on-screen than this genre normally provides. Also, guns in this game seem pretty worthless overall, and the distraction of trying to use them (only for more zombies to take the place of the ones you kill) hardly seems worth the effort compared to simply keeping your attention on debris you can scatter. And while the game does try to shake things up with different goals and situations, in the end it’s still pretty repetitive.

One other thing – as you might expect for a game with mobile origins, Corridor Z fully supports touchscreen controls. However, those controls aren’t very responsive, and I found myself quickly losing when trying to play the game this way. Stick to more traditional controls for this one.

As Auto-Runners go, I give Corridor Z credit for trying something a bit different in its focus on keeping ahead of an onrushing horde of zombies, and for the most part it’s a fairly competent game in its genre, but it’s not without its problems. Overall, it’s not a terrible distraction, but far from a great one.

tl;dr – Corridor Z is an Auto-Runner that depicts the action from in front of a character running from a horde of zombies in a school and trying to toss debris in their way as it comes into view. It’s not a bad entry in the genre, but the view does give players less time to react, and the game still suffers the repetition that many of this genre’s games fall prey to.

Grade: C+

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