6-Jul-2005 Full hands-on preview rises from beyond the grave... and it's looking like one you'll want to, er, possess Warwick-based Blitz Games recently invited us to play Possession, its first original title in years and one of the first true next-gen contenders. It's a title which employs a classic bit of role reversal by casting you as a Zombie commander, controller of the legions of undead, rather than the usual last human survivor escaping the zombie hordes.
Although initially described as a squad-based affair, we actually think it's better to describe Possession another way - you are a rather large gun that looks like a dreadlocked super-zombie. Your zombies are the equivalent of ammo and if you're intelligent in your approach you can turn living humans into all kinds of zombie bullet to serve your destructive purposes.
How? Well for one you can simply go up to a human, bite it and it becomes a zombie. However much better to command one of your initial four zombie slaves to do it for you. Zombie types range from the slow, but overwhelming-in-numbers Shambler, to the quick-moving Runner (like the guys from 28 Days Later) and the Bloater, which works much like a walking time bomb... of body gas! Add to this the Shredders who are wall-crawling bastards of the highest order and the huge Monster zombie who is ridiculously powerful and you have quite a formidable range of weapons/slaves at your disposal.
Your goal is to enslave the entire island you are based on and amass a large enough army to bring down the evil organisation that bestowed you with your gift/curse/disease. We got to play a very early build of the game which was already of considerable polish even though it represents just six months development time. We kid you not when we say there were about 100 or so characters onscreen all controllable and all usable in the game. All with working collision detection and not the pre-rendered house of lies others were showing off at this year's E3.
We played and interacted with all of it and it also had considerably fewer bugs than plenty of the commercially ready product we've seen in our lifetime. Suffice it to say we were impressed.
Also of note was that this demo in the city-based level was purely a proof of concept and was built to show the tech working and the basic premise in action. However as the Enslaver, you already have a huge number of actions at your zombie command, so let's examine them one by one:
Angry Cam A direct rip-off from Evil Dead and expertly done too! You leave the vessel of your body to travel ahead in spirit form to see what dangers lurk ahead - things like army troops camped out awaiting your arrival or big-ass tanks. Make sure your body isn't left out in the open though or a crafty sniper will take you out without mercy.
Possess While in Angry Cam mode you can possess one of your zombies. If your zombie comes equipped with a rocket launcher, this is especially useful. This is especially useful for moving quickly around far-flung regions of the game map too. Once a zombie is possessed, you control it until you leave the body or get killed.
Instant kill grab Walk up to an opponent, press the A button and chew away at your target's head. Instant zombie!
We also found the selection options very versatile and easy to grasp. You can group your zombies by pointing the reticule at the floor and pressing and holding 'R'. A circular zone expands relative to how long you hold the button and 'groups' all zombies in that zone as one. You can set up groups and cycle through them separately at the touch of a button.
You can also send them all in one by one - point at target and press X (we're playing on a PC here and using an Xbox controller by the way). The number of successive button taps equals the number of zombies sent in. Additionally, you can send them in by percentages, meaning when you point your reticule at the target and press and hold 'X', you'll see a circle start to appear in quarters around the reticule. These represent the percentages, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%, each quarter counting for 25% of your group. Sounds a bit more complex than it actually is.
The other options available to the player were sadly restricted due to the early nature of the build. A feature currently being implemented is the ability to mutate zombies into different types. You use a form of currency gained through killing which is known as mutation points to finance this.
There is also an online multiplayer mode promised which we particularly like the sound of. Imagine multiple zombie masters each controlling hundreds of undead slaves to destroy each other in an orgy of zombie fuelled fighting. Our brains can barely contain themselves.
The single-player demo we played was set up as a time-based challenge, testing your skill by enslaving as many humans as possible with as few casualties as possible. After eight minutes, we'd enslaved the lot, though lost a few good zombies in the process giving us the rank of 'Mindless Button Masher'. A fair ranking as we ended up doing just that when it all got a bit chaotic. Either way, it was easy to get to grips with and pretty smooth sailing once underway.
The only thing we would say that sold the concept short at the moment (early demo timeline withstanding) is that we didn't get much of a feel for the level design. Refreshingly, Blitz didn't duck away from this and conceded as much. Frankly, we can't wait to play Possession again once the developer's got some more advanced level designs in place.
Possession was one of the most surprising and refreshing offerings of this year's E3, and nothing we've seen since has made us change our mind. The game concept is great, the design seems sound, the designers were genuinely confident, open, honest and healthily self-critical folk (always a good sign) and the tech was certainly solid. Now all it needs is a publisher to unleash the next-gen zombie hordes on an unsuspecting world.
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