ZombiU producer acknowledges early reviews as big disappointment, happy about overall reception

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   December 17th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Wii U exclusive survival horror first-person shooter producer not happy about early review scores, though glad with overall reception of game.

ZombiU, the highly-anticipated launch title for Nintendo’s first-ever HD console, failed to make a very solid impact early on, with the reviews not bothering to keep it easy on the new intellectual property (IP).

The game’s producer Guillaume Brunier did not hide his disappointment over coming across the initial reviews during a recent interview with Nintendo Life.

He admitted that the Wii U exclusive title was not perfect and that the studio was well aware of the evident strengths and weakness of the game, but the sort of criticism that it had attracted early on was unwarranted and without merit.

One of the primary issues that the gamers seem to have with ZombiU is that it does not feel at home in the first-person shooter genre and should have rather been made a survival horror third-person game.

Brunier conceded during the interview that Ubisoft Montpellier had never hidden anything from the gamers since the very first gameplay footage and thus the sudden disliking for the way the game plays out comes off as a bit of a surprise.

“We were really disappointed with the early US reviews. We are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the experience we created but we did not expect so harsh a feedback,” he said.

Other negative reviews for the game called it sloppy and poorly executed, a poor entry into the survival horror genre, with some journalists lambasting the control scheme and melee combat, tagging the two as clunky and annoying respectively.

The ZombiU producer was relieved that the criticism on the game primary remained restricted to the US only, with the game getting a positive reception in other regions.

He noted that as more and more people took a taste of the experience that Ubisoft had created for the Wii U, the positive reviews began to take precedence over the negative reviews, thus making the sting from the early reviews far less painful for the developer.

“As more and more journalists and gamers played the game, these opinions proved to be a minority. So right now we’re rather pleased with the overall reception of the game.”

Released as a launch title for Nintendo’s next-generation console on November 18 in the US, November 30 in UK and Australia, before eventually arriving in Japan on December 8, the survival horror first-person shooter is designed in a way to challenge the hardcore gamers.

The game makes intensive use of Wii U’s tablet-inspired controller GamePad, with the touch-screen used to manage the player’s inventory, display mini-map, show player’s location and nearby items, hacking combination locks, barricading doors, etc.