Early AccessAttract Mode
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environments owe a fair
debt to Sniper Elite 4ӝBUT... HOW
DOES IT PLAY?
Yeah, it usually helps to tell
you this stuff, doesn’t it?
Zombie Army 4 plays... well.
If you did pick up either
Sniper Elite 4 or Strange
Brigade, you’ll know roughly
what to expect – especially
if it was the latter you went
for. The third-person action
is snappy and satisfying,
rarely leaving you wanting
with navigation, shooting, or
even turning tail and legging
it from an unexpected swarm
of the undead. It’s instantly
satisfying, and there’s no
doubt it’ll be fun with friends,
but the real test will come
with those added perks and
upgrades: will they alter the
balance too much? And will
it lead to a false sense of
progress, or really bring
something solid to the table?killing shooter. It’s not something you have to
pay attention to, but there’s a lot of depth there
if that’s your thing.”
It’s all presented with what could potentially
be described as ‘a bit of swagger’. Rebellion is a
confident developer at this point, long removed
from the days of the grinding output of a work-
for-hire schedule, and the ability for the team
to draw from recent successes has proven
another boon to Zombie
Army 4. ȊWe’ve looked at
what people liked about
Strange Brigade and Sniper
Elite, and brought those
things across to Zombie
Army, like the X-ray kill cams, traps, that sort of
thing,ȋ Woodward says. ȊThere’s also the fact
the dev teams from the previous two titles and
Zombie Army Trilogy have transitioned across to
the Zombie Army 4 team, so a lot of what people
learned on Strange Brigade, Sniper Elite 4, and ZAT
has trickled down into Zombie Army 4 as well.
That experience comes across in the game.ȋ
Powering all of this – and most of Rebellion’s
output since around 2000 – is the proprietary
Asura engine. Rebellion co-founder Jason
Kingsley once said that the studio making its
own engine ‘probably wasn’t the best idea at
the time’, but decades of upgrades, updates,
tweaks, and experience (on the dev side) means
the team is now in a position where the burden
has become a boon in a big way. ȊI love Asura
as an engine,ȋ Woodward says. ȊI’ve used a ton
of different engines, and Asura is technically
really good, as well as being really intuitive for
designers... Well, for anyone really, who’s used
industry-standard engines. Having our own
independent engine internally allows us to
iterate in a way that suits us and develop the
technology that plays
to the strengths of the
games we typically make.
It’s massively paid off. It’s
competing strongly with
a lot of other engines.”
2f course, making your own entire engine isn’t
something every indie can actually do – it’s not
just the actual creation of the tool, but the ability
to survive a further couple of decades and be
able to improve things as you go.
Rebellion is in the unique position to be able
to use Asura at its best, and as such has focused
more on the stuff that really matters to those
making the games: how it plays. It was evident
with Sniper Elite 4 and Strange Brigade, and – so
far – it’s looking like it might be the case with
=omELe$Um\ , too.Early AccessAttract Mode
“Fans were asking for
more, so we went bigger
and better in every way” Situations like this will
ƃriseӗ consistentȢʰӗ ƃnǁ ƃre
oǹten high-pressure ǹunӝwfmag.cc \ 13