Frontline Zed

Genre: Arcade / Shooting Gallery

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Frontline Zed is an Arcade-style Shooting Gallery game where players stationed at a barricade must use firearms to fend off hordes of zombies. This game was released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020.

This game makes use of some pretty underwhelming 3D visuals, and the strange thing is that it uses these for both the characters and the backgrounds, even though the camera remains stationary – even though the point of view doesn’t change, you have to put up with ugly aliasing and muddy textures, something that could have been easily replaced with a detailed static background. The visuals are also dark, muddy, and lacking in personality. This is paired with a dull, droning soundtrack that gives the game a serious tone, but doesn’t do more than that.

The game has day and night sections – at night, the gameplay here has players taking aim at zombies from behind a barrier, with this position changing location in each change of location. In-between levels during the day, players can select which locations to use a limited amount of hours to explore, hoping to find survivors (NPC helper characters) and new equipment and weapons.

Unfortunately, both day and night sections come with problems. During the day, there’s no real way of knowing if any location will have anything useful – you’re basically rolling the dice, which makes one wonder why the game even bothers giving players the choice. And as for the actual action at night, this gameplay is tedious and repetitive, and while the game encourages headshots, the odd slightly isometric angle the game uses makes it unnecessarily difficult to do so – even if your crosshairs are on a zombies head, you could easily take multiple shots to down them.

I suppose there’s some fun to be dragged out of Frontline Zed – blasting away hordes of zombies has some appeal, and there’s always a bit of excitement when your daytime searches uncover a new weapon or survivor. Unfortunately, it’s hard to play this game without seeing the multitude of ways this game could be improved, both in the basic mechanics of its gunplay, the lack of variety in enemies and situations, and the lack of player utility in the daytime sections. If you’re looking for a simple zombie game on Nintendo Switch, this one will do the trick, but it’s not one I would recommend.

tl;dr – Frontline Zed is an Arcade-style Shooting Gallery game where players protect a barricade by shooting zombies. Unfortunately, the game suffers from numerous problems, such as issues with the aiming mechanics, lack of player utility in the game’s daytime sections, ugly graphics, and overall tedious gameplay. It’s not without its harms, but overall this game isn’t really worth it.

Grade: C-

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