The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

A long time ago, I put a game called Rock of the Dead on my Gamefly queue. It was supposed to be a light gun game that used the Guitar Hero controllers. This, to me, sounded like a great idea. I mean, a typing game made a fantastic light gun shooter. I pictured something that was sort of a cross between Typing of the Dead and Gitaroo Man. Only with zombies, I guess, because zombies are overused. But still, it would be pretty sweet, right? Even a mediocre game like that could be fairly fun.

Holy shit, Rock of the Dead is terrible.

From the moment you turn the game on, you know you’re in for an extremely budget experience. The menus are awful. They’re like standard XNA fonts on something that is supposed to look like a notebook, but most of the text is too small to read, even on an HD screen. That’s quite a feat. I was immediately filled with dread, but I figured since I had it rented, I might as well try it. What’s the harm, right? Might be some easy achievements, if nothing else.

Once you get into the game proper, it gets even worse. The graphics are PS2 era, at best, with little to no animation on anything. There are voice actors doing a “story” here, but oh man, it is so terrible. And not in a “funny” way. It’s just bad. They’re trying to say jokes that aren’t even jokes, and the game seems to pause and wait for you to laugh, like there was somebody out there who would. Even in the first screen, objects are repeated exactly. There are these meteors, and they are literally cut and pasted everywhere. There is a grandfather character who is not actually animated to stand up, so I guess he kind of teleports around in this lawn chair all the time.

All this could be forgiven in the gameplay was actually fun, but they basically screwed up the one thing I wouldn’t think anyone would screw up: attacking enemies does not involve playing the guitar. If this is a guitar game, everything I do needs to sound like badass guitar riffs or play into an overall song. This game doesn’t do that at all. There is an incredibly generic and unsatisfying shooting noise each time you hit a note. It doesn’t feel like you’re playing a guitar at all. Sometimes there will be a “boss,” where you have to play a song, but this song is completely disconnected from the soundtrack of the level. Like, the soundtrack of the level just stops, this plays for 20 seconds or whatever, and then the level comes back in. There’s nothing musical about the experience whatsoever.

I hope nobody actually purchased this game. It’s pretty completely garbage with what could have been an easy, fun idea and an enjoyable budget game. Man, what an unfortunate waste.