

The original release of Stubbs featured a really great and inventive soundtrack made up of covers of classic 50s songs covered by then-modern indie bands. The first and most notable thing to mention is the soundtrack. It doesn’t help that the move from the original console to today’s re-release has actually made things even more charmless than they were before. Some enemies becoming immortal or simply not spawning in at all. NPC’s spawning in out of nowhere, or getting stuck in walls after explosions. I recorded multiple occasions of game-breaking bugs and crashes.
STUBBS THE ZOMBIE 2 PC TRIAL
This is made more of a trial by the litany of bugs plaguing the release. The engagement isn’t there to keep you rewarded and over the somewhat short runtime playing quickly becomes a chore. I was left literally floundering in a loop of an area attempting to find the next section and having no idea what I needed to do or where I needed to go to trigger progression. Much of the time you’ll also not actually know where you are supposed to go with infrequent use of progression markers that only appear once every five or so areas. There are long stretches of the game where enemies have the ability to one-hit kill you out of nowhere, often leading to repeated replays of long sections due to terribly implemented save points.
STUBBS THE ZOMBIE 2 PC SERIES
It feels as though this could have been a concept transposed to a more open-world formula a few years down the line, but here you are playing a linear series of sequences that tell a relatively thin yet still slightly entertaining story.ĭespite some inventive powers, the game is very restricted leading to something that actually feels like a bit of a slog at times. The game more or less just tells you to go ahead and have fun with the concept of being the returned dead, giving you a slowly growing, if small, set of abilities to cause havoc with and letting you loose. Set in a satirical take on the 1950s city of the future, you are a suddenly reanimated zombie awoken during the official grand opening of the city of Punchbowl, Pennsylvania.

Stubbs was originally built for the Xbox on the Halo engine and was a point of reference for the original marketing. If anything, that’s the first thing that stands out, bringing the game to modern consoles and placing it into a market with more modern games just highlights all its flaws. Simultaneously, all the issues it previously had are still here. The game is almost completely unchanged, with some small but important changes I’ll get to in a moment, as such everything that people enjoyed about Stubbs the Zombie is here for the most part, with some small exceptions. This is to its detriment as a modern product though.

Some will think this is the right way to go, as it is important to preserve the original title for those who want to revisit and those who never got to before now. Aspyr has done the bare minimum required to bring Stubbs back to life. The first thing to note here is that this isn’t an overhaul of a classic title with new visuals and improved features. Now, fifteen years after its initial release, we see original North American publishers Aspyr put in the time to bring this monster of the past back to life and bring it into the modern world. It didn’t really take off though, releasing in small numbers and after a turbulent development.ĭespite its inventive ideas and more humorous take on horror, it just became thought of as an obscure gem.

A game that aimed to reinvent the zombie genre that was dominated with Resident Evil. Stubbs the Zombie has always been one of those obscure but well-regarded titles.
