Trapped Dead is a welcome breath of not-so-fresh air in the realm of zombie games. From Dead Rising to Left 4 Dead, zombie games are usually frenetic affairs where players bounce about like Sonic the Hedgehog on a stimulant. Headup Games has brought us a game where tactics and inventory management are of the utmost importance, as is using the individual skills of your party members to their fullest and keeping good tactical discipline in your party’s formations. In essence, Trapped Dead is reminiscent of games like Commandos and Baldur’s Gate in that you spend most of your time carefully planning out your next movements before committing to a fight as each could be one or more of your party member’s last…
Trapped Dead starts with two friends driving across country when they stop for gas at a seemingly-abandoned fuel station. As it usually does in these situations, zombies are running (shambling in this case) rampant and eating on the living. Along the adventure, you will gain new characters in your party – each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, on of the characters – a medical doctor, is wheelchair bound. He cannot move as quickly as the others but can heal like no other and, when given a street howitzer, is a formidable sentry turret of sorts. Each party member has limited inventory space and managing this space is of the utmost importance. To make matters worse, there are not a lot of supplies out there to scavenge so you have to make every shot or med pack count at just the right moment to get out of a situation in the best shape possible. Gameplay can be paused and un-paused with the spacebar.
The zombies of Trapped Dead come in many flavors – most of which shamble about like those found in Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero’s films. This is also a welcome sight for the zombie game genre as most have the undead running about like marathon runners for shock and intensity. After playing Trapped Dead, though, you will find out that managing your quickly depleting stock of pistol rounds while seeing tons of zombies slowly converging on your position is just as intense and, sometimes more so as you have time to see it coming… What could you do different next time? What new tactics could you try? Thankfully, these questions will occupy your thoughts quite a bit in Trapped Dead and you will be aching to give that particularly hard mission another go.
The game’s narrative is presented through a large series of graphic novel panels as well as late 1970’s grindhouse / 1980’s horror movie style. Corny dialog abounds as well as dated equipment to sell the time period in which the game takes place. Unfortunately, while that dated / corny stuff really helps sell the game – the voice over work doesn’t. Purposeful grindhouse is a great thing when the actor’s buy into it and, in this case, the voice over characters just don’t quite hit where they should have. They are not Troll 2 bad, mind you, but they could have definitely been a lot better!
Visually, Trapped Dead is a simple game – but that simplicity translates very well on screen with crisp environments and characters. With very few options to set in the graphics menu, it is also worth noting that the game would not run on my PC in ultra-widescreen modes (5760×1080). I had to reduce it down to single-screen, 1920×1080. Once at that resolution, I experienced no more visual issues worth mentioning. Aside from the voice over work, Trapped Dead features some really fun and creepy sound design. From the period score to the background noise of flesh eaters moaning and environmental effects, Trapped Dead’s audio is very well done and commendable.
Multiplayer was an aspect we were desperately trying to make work as apparently the game supports cooperative gameplay. Unfortunately, we experienced constant timeouts when trying to ping available servers. Despite this, after playing through the singelplayer stuff, I can make an educated guess that the multiplayer would be a hoot given the game mechanics.
The only other complaint with Trapped Dead is that its control system seems sluggish at times. I would switch between characters and it seemed like the game did not pickup the keypress. Aside from this, the game controls relatively well in terms of what buttons do what function.
Overall, Trapped Dead is a welcome breath of fetid air for the zombie game genre. With a gameplay system a la Commandos and Baldur’s Gate as well as plenty of gore and undead to be found, we highly recommend you give this one a try. Trapped Dead is currently retailing for $19.95 and the game could have easily sold for one and a half times that amount. If you are a fan of zombie games or tactical strategy titles, you won’t be disappointed.
