Contagion (2013)

What's great? - Atmosphere is fantastic. - Realistic Z-Day environments - Headshot's are really the only way to down them. - Creates a real sense of urgency and desperation - Graphics are nice; neither bad nor good, but still of high quality. - Melee is not a wonder weapon. Takes skill and precision. - Gun's behave like realistic weapons. - Large and respectful mapping / modding community. What's bad? - Weird headshot detection; could be due to glancing shots, or the bullet not actually hitting the head but appears to. - Maps can be confusing (which may be the intention) - Controls / aiming CAN be an issue. The controls are easy, just like an FPS but the guns and angles they fire on can sometimes put you off; I put this down to realistic fields of view, and **** always shooting straight like most shooters have you believe. - Melee is not easy to use. When should I play it? LAN's Coop environments Groups of friends Not ideal for solo play. Summary: One of THE best COOP games out there. We play this at LAN's and EVERYONE enjoys it. We often sit back and watch our recorded matches, from different perspectives and all of us lose it laughing. The atmosphere is really the bread winner for this game, and there is no other game out there at the moment that comes close. Support the dev's, and the community. If you have a lot of pals, convince them to grab this and you will have memories of this game to share. A great experience.

THE BAD Movement can sometimes feel clunky, for example, when running and stopping it almost feels like you're on ice, slipping around. There's just something that doesn't feel quite right. However, for the most part, the controls are as responsive as they need to be to make an enjoyable game. The animations are pretty rudimentary, not very detailed and generally look awkward. This is more forgiveable on the zombies, because, well, they're zombies. However, some of the animations on the player models could use more than a little work. I'm not sure where the Contagion devs stand on this and whether or not animations are at all on their "to do list", and to be perfectly honest, I can live with the animations as is, but some improvements would make for a more immersive experience. The worst offender in this case is trying to board up windows and doors where the animations will bug out almost every time and don't seem to play correctly, ever.. It doesn't stop you from actually boarding anything, however, so its not game breaking, just immersion breaking (I leave it to the reader to decide how egregious that is, I'm not necessarily looking for an immersive experience with games like Contagion - I recommend Day Z for that) . Some of the maps... to be perfectly frank, are just boring. Rananoke PD being (my opinion) the worst offender. It's just so bland and uninteresting, though I honestly couldn't suggest how to make a Police department interesting, and it is a location you would expect to find in this setting for any discerning zombie survivalist. I think, in an attempt to address to the "blandness" of this map, the Contagion devs decided to expand on its concept by making it a virtual prison, complete with tiers and mess halls. I'm not sure how accurate that is of real life as I understand most jails are actually independent of any police station. It also doesn't do much except add to the length of the map. Sound effects... Are just not that great. Especially the guns, with the possible exception of the m4 and AKM, are not what I would call stellar. Not much music to speak of, I think the only track is the menu music, though this game, arguably, doesn't really need much in the way of music anyway. It sort of adds to the deadness of the atmosphere and the idea that man's time on earth is potentially up. However, that could just be this authors bias presenting itself as I quite like this game. THE GOOD - game play. Besides the sometimes clunky movement is really, really good. It emphasizes teamwork and punishes lone wolves (usually with a horrible, bitey death). Even on lower difficulties, without care, you can find yourself in a sticky situation. The emphasis on headshots (a la Romero "head shots only" zombies) and primarily slow moving zombies and the necessity to conserve ammo make for a more interesting and deep cooperative experience than contemporaries, like, say L4D1/2. Attempts to take on the zombie horde lone hero will more than likely result in death. In fact, if you can avoid the zombies altogether, that's usually the better option, again, unlike L4D where you are essentially forced into killing every single zombie that gets in your path. In this way it makes somewhat of an attempt to make it more realistic, ammo is scarce, so don't waste it on a slow moving target across the map that will never catch up to you. - Taking ques from its predecessors. This game is, in no doubt, highly influenced by popular games such as Left For Dead. It not only takes into consideration that things it did right, but the things it did wrong as well. Contagion, while similar in many ways, has also carved out its own unique niche, making it a distinctly different game. "Special infected" are handled much like L4D's "uncommon-common infected" such as the riot gear wearing zombies in some campaigns. These make an appearance in Contagion as well, and for a disorganized team, can mean total disaster. In many ways when you see these types of zombies it's more of an "oh **** moment because they are actually hard to deal with. In L4D coop modes I (and most other people) can solo anything without so much as a second thought. Tank? Molotov and run the timer down. There's no such easy options in Contagion, however. Sure, you can run from it, leave it behind, but chances are you're back tracking through that same area meaning you'll have to deal with this fully armored zombie eventually. Annnnd I'm running out of space (stupid 5k word limit!), so I'll cut to chase: If you like L4D, you'll probably like this game, especially if you like a challenge and a more "realistic" environment. I would give this game a full 8/10 if it felt finished, but it doesn't... And that's probably because its still under active development with content coming at a fairly regular pace. Recommend it to any zombie fans!

This game, in its current state, is very firmly a 7. It could easily have the potential to be a 9 very soon, but for now it still leaves something to be desired. There are 3 modes: Escape, Extraction, and Hunt. Escape is a very L4D-style run through the map and try to survive. Extraction is basically a take on Horde-style holding a point against waves of enemies combined with escort quests. To me, both of these modes are pretty shallow and don't really have much that keeps me wanting to play them more than a couple times. The real fun to be had in this game is in the third mode: Hunt. Hunt is an up to 8 person free-for-all where the goal is to be the last person alive. There are zombies everywhere that you must deal with in addition to other humans, and when a person dies they become a zombie as well who tries to hunt the remaining humans. Everyone starts with essentially the same equipment: a random melee weapon and a pistol. A ton of random weapons and ammo are placed around the levels so you're supposed to want to try to fight through zombies in order to secure equipment and be better prepared to take down other players (as well as survive the zombies). In reality, that's not really what happens. The zombies are comically easy to avoid in the beginning of the game because there are usually very few bunched up, which will happen later due to gunfire, and there are no player zombies (the only zombies who really have a chance to catch you while you're running). So what happens is that everyone just sprints to the nearest location they know that spawns weapons and hopes for something good. Thus, your likelihood of winning the game is mostly determined by where you spawn and the RNG of the weapon-spawner (unless you do lame it up, which I'll get into later). If you get one of about five different weapons (2 SMGs, 2 assault rifles, or the best shotgun), it is impossible to ever lose a gunfight to someone with a pistol and thus you will simply dominate anyone you see early on who wasn't similarly lucky (which creates a very unfun mechanic of "oh look, the first person I ran into, 20 seconds into the game, had an AR15, I lose... awesome!) And speaking of the AR15, this gun is just brokenly stupid. The other assault rifle, the AK, has terrible recoil and thus is very difficult to kill at a distance with the ironsight. The MP5 is probably the second best gun, but is significantly far behind the AR simply because it has difficulty killing people at range. The AR dominates close and long range. An easy solution to the early gun lottery would be to make strong weapons start without ammo so that it takes longer before that amazing assault rifle you found comes online. It's still RNG, which ****, but at least it wouldn't feel so punishing so soon into the match. There are also a lot of bugs in the game, not the least of which is hit detection and randomly invulnerable zombies. With your melee weapon you can one-shot zombies by using your power attack (right-click) and hitting them in the head. Except sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can hit the same zombie (AI zombie, not even a player zombie) in the head, seeing the blood indicating impact, with your power attack 10 times before it will die. This is a problem because typically you need to move quickly while clearing zombies, and when you melee one you need to keep running so the ones that are chasing you don't catch up. But when the zombie in front of you doesn't go down in 1-2 hits, not only is he hitting you, but the zombies behind are going to trap you, and you're basically dead. So this time you didn't lose because of the early RNG, you lost because randomly super zombie, which is no less annoying. Finally, equally a large problem, is that the actual easiest way to win at Hunt is simply to find a hiding spot and stay there the entire round (this is more of a problem on 2 of the 4 maps, but can be done to reasonable success on any of them). Other people who are going for weapons will end up running into other people and getting in gunfights, drawing zombies. Then people will die and those player zombies will hunt the people who are running around (because a: they have a better idea where they are due to gunfire sounds and b: given how long it takes to destroy a closed door as a zombie, it's an extremely unproductive and boring use of time to check hiding spots for players). Thus, you're rewarded for playing as boringly as possible. An easy fix to this problem would be to use a Battle Royale-type system for moving people out of sections of the map routinely. This could fit into the game by being a Walking Dead-esque zombie herd that swarms slowly through the map, bit-by-bit, checking every spot. In the end, the game has a lot of potential, and sometimes ends up being very fun, but currently due to a lot of bugs and a few mechanics which don't feel rewarding at all, it usually ends up being as much frustration as fun.

Купил, подождал добавление русского языка официально, и ........... В итоге играю либо с китайцами либо один, не понятно что делать, умираешь становишься зомби, в лефт деде было интереснее реализовано. Вообщем не понял за что заплатил деньги, на картинках смотрелось поинтереснее, может нужно играть в 4? Может.

This title had so much promise, but ultimately has failed to deliver on the promise or hype over the years. It is most certainly not a bad game, but it will never be a great like Zombie Panic!: Source. Pros: The graphics and map designs are between excellent and outstanding. The game modes are solid, though with few populated servers (more on that in a moment), those that require more than one player really aren't an option. The weapon selection is pretty good when compared to similar offerings. The characters available are pretty good and some are from the much beloved ZP:S. The player controlled zombies are, thankfully, not nerfed and you can actually win as a zed. The overall atmosphere is dark, spooky, and what you'd like to see in a zombie game. Cons: There are a handful of outstanding glitches that can be annoying for some players. The melee system is passable, but can't hold a candle to other zombie titles. Game updates have been painfully slow and scheduled updates have been missed repeatedly. There is no way to remove trolls and griefers from a server (e.g., vote kick), so you either have to endure their antics, or simply disconnect. The developers have stated this will be addressed in a future update, but as of this writing, it has not. Which brings me to the community: it is nearly dead already. In the last few months, the number of populated servers tends to hover around six, give or take one or two depending upon the hour. There are many hundreds of completely empty servers. The populated servers are playing the same old maps that have been played to death since late 2013. Some are keeping hope alive that the much awaited updates will revitalize the game, but I, frankly, doubt it will matter at this point. It may have earlier in the year. As they are both zombie games, Source-based and released around the same time, there is a lot of comparisons to No More Room in Hell thrown around. While not an entirely fair comparison as their gaming mechanics are a bit difference, they are similar enough. NMRiH, with a few exceptions, is the better title, is receiving more frequent updates, and it is available completely free. In conclusion, this isn't a bad game, but it isn't a great one either. If you are a hardcore Zombie Panic! fan, you likely already own it. If you really like the zombie FPS genre, I'd say pick it up as the price of admission is worth a few hours of fun. If you are a more casual gamer, however, you might want to skip this one as you'll likely be disappointed. With only a handful of populated servers, unchecked griefing in some, **** glitches, and a sluggish update cycle, it probably isn't enough bang for your buck.