But that's all superfluous compared to ZombiU's greatest flaw: combat. Textures are blocky, zombies clip through walls, and there's nothing I can think of as a truly visually impressive moment in the game. The levels are dark and spooky, but the game just doesn't look that good.

Moving around in ZombiU, I felt like I was a camera on a Segway - gliding across environments and making big wide turns. The game has all these great ideas, but it doesn't have the gameplay or polish to back them up. All of that’s cool, and that’s what sucks about ZombiU. If you’re super-hardcore, you can play through a mode where you have just one life to live. But with zombies and those British guards in the funny hats. Even cooler, when one of your characters goes down, your next character has to trudge out to the spot of the previous character’s demise to bash the former you's zombie brains in and collect all the items they had looted and were carrying. The title tracks how long each survivor has been alive and tallies a score based on your performance, so there's this metagame of trying to beat your best playthroughs, which are uploaded to the online leaderboards for the world to see. Again, it makes no sense when you think about it, but it’s a really cool game mechanic for ZombiU. The survivor goes down and you respawn back at the subway station as a new character who somehow knows everything your old character knew and is ready to pick up the task at hand. Because once you’re bitten, your character is dead.

The voice gives you missions, you unlock shortcuts and even run into some other characters, but the whole point of ZombiU is to survive for as long as you can. See, you start as a survivor in a subway station, a voice over the PA gives you your first mission, and you're off - whacking zombies with a cricket bat, collecting samples and so on. The game isn't trying to tell you the next great video game story, and some of its nonsensical points are actually its coolest. There's no real narrative to ZombiU, and that's fine.

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