Review: Dead Z Meat
Dead Z Meat is a game that originally launched in 2020 on the Nintendo Switch and mobile platforms, but the game just got a PC release just a few days ago, and it felt worthy of re-assessing it to see how it plays with PC light guns and with modern performance updates on PC.
The game is made by a small Hungarian development team, featuring a somewhat silly and cartoonish aesthetic, and some fairly repetitive gameplay segments that lead you across a large board-game style overworld map, leading your way towards collecting an antidote for curing a zombie outbreak.
The main game consists of survival-based shooting segments where you’ll need to kill the zombies before they reach you and attack, and while some of this is based on skill, after just a short time with the game, it becomes clear that it’s impossible to progress without upgrading some of your weapons. This leads to a very grindy progression system to be able to continue with the game, similar to most mobile games.
You’ll likely have to end up replaying some of the levels to grind for money to do the upgrades, and there’s only 4 or 5 different locations that keep repeating throughout the game’s many stages, with different enemy waves and layouts on each one, which get pretty tiresome. Every once in a while, it changes things up a little, adding some “protect the barrel” levels and sniper levels that add some extra challenge, but these only slightly and temporarily change the general gameplay loop.
While the gameplay is generally mildly engaging and can be fun in some moments, the grinding and escalating difficulty elements can get a little tiresome, especially when coupled with how buggy the game is, which can thwart your efforts more frequently than it should.
Enemies often get caught on the geometry of the ground or other dead enemies, causing them to jump around the stage wildly when trying to get un-stuck, and some will even spawn themselves in an area where they can’t get un-stuck and you can’t hit them. So, when the completion requirement is to kill all enemies and you encounter this glitch, you’ll have to end up fully restarting the stage to have a chance at completing it and moving forward.
While the gameplay can be fun from time to time, other major factor to consider is the controls, which will vary based on the platform you choose. On the original Switch release, using the gyro motion controls of the JoyCons leaves a lot to be desired, with the general lagginess, inaccuracy of the aiming, and having to reset your cursor constantly. It makes the minute-to-minute gameplay feel like more of a chore than it should be, but is still somewhat playable.
When it comes to the PC release, things are a lot better in a general sense, but there’s still a handful of issues when playing with light guns. Since the game doesn’t natively support raw mouse input, there’s occasionally issues where the shot cursor will stop reading in certain parts of the screen, forcing you to wildly move the gun off screen and back again to hope the tracking picks up again in-game.
This caused quite a few frustrations in my time with the PC version, where I tested it with the RS3 guns and the Sinden, and both had different but equally frustrating issues with the lack of raw mouse input. After a while, I got more used to the nuances of it and found a few little tricks to stop it from happening quite so often, but it was a constant annoyance.
As with a lot of modern light gun style games, the simple addition of the raw mouse input option would fix so many issues for light gun users, but developers rarely ever put the option in, even after players request it. There’s actually very few options in the game’s menus at all, which feels like a leftover from it being developed on a mobile platform, but even after porting to PC, there no video options, no control options, and not even any tutorial or reference screens showing you how to control the game, which just shows a lack of polish in general.
The inability to remap controls can also lead to issues with some guns, where you’ll need to reprogram gun buttons outside the game or run a remap script to get the weapon switching or zoom function on the sniper levels to work at all. The game is also quite unoptimized on PC, causing most PCs to run pretty hot when the visuals don’t really demand it, so some users with an older or underpowered PC might have some performance issues.
While the game can provide some fun for light gun fans, it’ll always come with a handful of issues and shortcomings no matter which platform you choose to play it on, but since the price is so low, it might still be worth some of your time, you’ll just need to go into it expecting these issues.