I think I may be losing my title making ability.
After all this time, some of you may find it weird that there’s a new post, especially, smack in the middle of the summer. The urge came in a hot summer afternoon after I got off of work while I was sipping my ginger ale, unlike The Oatmeal I don’t like ginger ale during flights, but on a hot summer end of day Nothing beats that lemony taste on a glassful of ice cubes. But I’m straying off topic… The most perceptive of you have possibly realized what I’m talking about from the oh so very unimaginative title this review presents itself with.
Today we’re not reviewing a game per se but a mod, DayZ for ARMA II. In itself I found ARMA II to be another “realistic” shooter from the likes of which the industry has filled up to the brim with lately, with the added aggravation of clunky gameplay, unintuitive controls and filled with so many bugs it makes the original Fallout New Vegas release look like a stable game. Unfortunately this “quirkiness” stills pours into to DayZ like a bucket filled with stale rain water leaking out of its rusty hull.
Unlike the original game, DayZ doesn’t rely on “realistic combat” focusing instead on the inherent realism of ARMA and setting the action during a Zombie Apocalypse. Many of you will have already played/heard/seen a Youtube video of DayZ by now, if you didn’t you might think “Oh another Zombie Mod for an FPS, yupedee-fuckin’-doo!” and considering the afore mentioned load of RFPS’s that have come out lately and the fiasco that was Dead Island, I’d be willing to give you this one. Problem is I’m not the kind of guy to swallow my pride and let a discussion die right then and there.
DayZ has the same kind of appeal as Minecraft, a “pointless” sandbox which the only objective you have is to survive, where it differs from minecraft is the graphics. Sure… the ARMA quirkiness I mentioned above includes more than a few graphic glitches, but in itself ARMA has some very pretty visuals, from vegetation, sky detail, texturing and lightning effects to make a lot of HDR powered games weep. Of course, you need a decent PC to play it on, maybe with a HyperThreaded Intel Dual Core processor, a 1GB RAM graphics board and 2GB RAM you’ll be able to play it at the lowest settings, but in order to enjoy this addictive dose of frustration and loss of faith in mankind the way it was meant to be enjoyed, you’ll need a mid-to-high end PC. But… once again, I’ve strayed from the matter at hand.
DayZ is still only in Alpha stage, but don’t let that fool you… it is by far one of the most immersive games I’ve played in the last few years, it’s on par with Silent Hill 2. That uncertainty of what lies around the corner, or hiding behind the foothills keeps me on the edge of my seat with my heart pounding in my ears. Speaking of audio, I like the selection of background music but the default settings make it sound so loud you might actually miss the rustling of zombies and other players in the bushes that’ll result in a very frustrating death… and you’ll die… you’ll die a lot, because while one or two zombies are manageable, by the time you start running you’ll have an entire horde running behind you, much like Left4Dead with a tenth of the ammo and the other players will try to kill you on sight. Don’t bother trying to talk to anyone of them, they will kill you, no questions asked, no quarter given. Hence the above comment regarding the faith in mankind… whichever tiny shard of faith in mankind I had was lost in the last month or so in DayZ.
Sure Co-Op is fun, a lot of fun and the more people you have with guns on your side the more likely you are to survive either an unfortunate run in with the walking dead or the other douchebags on the server.
But that’s the human factor, the mod in itself, in my opinion, in a gem in the rough, and if breaking away from ARMA will allow them to develop beyond the oh so famed “quirkiness” I’d be more than happy to $hell out some dough and help them hurry it along.
This was Unaccounted4 pondering the irony of this review with the state of undeath of this blog.





























