REVIEW : Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (PC)
Be the Zombie. Kick A** and Take Brains
It’s 1959 and the city of Punchbowl, PA, is a beacon of progress and ideal living. Show the living that law and order are no match for a dead man on a mission. Your boyfriend’s back Maggie and Punchbowl is gonna be in trouble!
Eat Brains
Chomp on the living and replenish your bodily arsenal of zombie sputum, gut grenades, and the stunning unholy flatulence
Possess Punchbowl’s Population
Clamp your severed hand to a barbershop quartet singer’s head and raygun away
Build Your Zombie Horde
Convert your enemies into undead allies & lead a zombie assault on the living
Bring Civilization to its Knees
Show the retro-futuristic city of Punchbowl, PA that they can’t escape the past
Stubbs and Chill
Invite a friend to play as Grubbs for classic couch cooperative hijinks. (Friend not included)
MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION
The developers describe the content like this:
This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content, Sexual Innuendoes, Smoking and Toilet Humor
Our Thoughts
Finally got to play this lil’ rough around the edges classic. As a kid I only ever played the demo and could never get my hands on the full copy and by the time I could get my hands on it the game was so old it just was utterly broken and impossible to play on modern systems and now that’s not the case anymore.
The main selling point of this game is the novelty of playing a zombie which oddly very few games let you do that in a single-player setting even to this day, usually it’s mostly reserved for MP infection stile modes and that’s about it.
The game is rough around the edges however, even for the time if I played this I would’ve made a note on how poor and kinda ugly the level design is and often how big and empty the levels are. A lot of levels tend to be just large empty areas, especially the last part of the game which is the weakest bit with lots of just big empty streets or corridors however the rest of the game (75%) does offer better diversity visually but is still pretty weak in terms of level design but the game doesn’t overstay it’s welcome, it’s a nice 4.5 hours long to beat it with a media play style, nailing a good enough length so you don’t get tired of it by the end.
A main fun aspect of it is just beings a shambling corpse causing chaos for the people in Pennsylvania, eating brains, painting rooms and streets in blood, gore and body parts and then having a squad or army of fellow undead following you around helping you out, granted they’re fairly dumb, and easy bad pun/joke could be made that they’re brain dead but that’s not even a joke, your shambling dead allies are pretty bad at following you often around, so more often then not if you gotta travel a long distance away it’s not worth trying to t*rd wrangle them unless you enjoy wasting your time.
Your character (Stubbs) is not completely a normal zombie, he has a few powers such as throwing his hand at an enemy to control their minds, using his head as a bowling ball that explodes, throwing his organs at enemies that he can detonate at will and also doing a massive AOE fart that stuns everyone in a radius.
Though I did complain that the level design is poor and kinda ugly, the gameplay variety is fairly solid on the other hand, you do mostly go about eating brains but the game has several parts where it throws some new mechanics to shake things up a bit like driving around a floating car that shoots turds at enemies, dancing mini-game against a midget and a few other things.
Cut scenes and story are pretty silly and fun, offering some occasional chuckles with its humorous tone.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- Operating System: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i3-4170 @ 3.7 GHz, AMD A8-7600 @ 3.1 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB
- Hard Drive Space: 5 GB
- Video Card (ATI): Radeon R9 M270
- Video Card (NVIDIA): GeForce GTX 660
- VRAM: 2 GB
