Review by François de Marquis

Undead Knights comes out swinging from the moment you boot up the game. A rocking intro gives the highlights of the basic game story:

Elderly King Gradis of Cavalier falls for Fatima the token chesty Tecmo femme fatale who mysteriously appears in his kingdom, and wastes no time manipulating the king and committing acts of treachery against those closest to the King. Namely ordering the execution of the House of Blood. A knightly family that has been loyal to the kingdom for generations, a son of which is engaged to Sylvia Gradis the King’s only daughter.

Remus Blood and Sylvia fall under the blade of the king’s army, and Romulus Blood with his dying breath makes a deal with The Beast (Who could it be I guess I’ll just have to take a stab in the dark — SATAN?!). The trio is granted the ability to live beyond death to avenge themselves by slaughtering all who oppose them. Prolonging their lives by siphoning their enemy’s life force and turning their foes into legions of the undead that do their bidding.

Yeah, it’s not literature; and as you play the game you’re bound to see some themes and visual influences from Kentaro Miura’s Berserk manga series, but it’s a premise that I can get behind.

Starting a new game you’re given the choice of controlling either Remus, Romulus, or Sylvia. The character designs of the three main characters are all pretty solid and fit the genre tropes of big guy that hits hard with a gigantic executioners sword, nimble svelte guy who dual wields swords, and gal who is even more nimble and dispatches foes with a scythe. For this review I chose Romulus who bears a slight resemblance to Nightmare from the Soul Calibur series and any given knightly figure on European power metal album covers.

The game begins after a brief introduction to the chapter with a nice narration by Susan Silo channeling the Crypt Keeper. Each chapter in the game opens with this narration which you can listen to or skip, but it’s enjoyable enough so I sat through them.

Game play is pretty straight forward. You enter a stage, you will be given an objective for that area – defeat the leader, destroy object, create zombie bridge, etc. once you complete this objective you advance to the next area of the stage. The game stages are persistent, but broken up into separate areas which load, typically when you cross a particular threshold, loading is masked by your character running in slow motion while the hardware loads data from the disk instead of a “Now Loading…” screen which I always find grating because it openly interrupts the action.

You’ll accomplish your objectives in each stage by attacking enemies and turning them into zombies. You can use Zombie Impact without beating your enemy into submission; but that will trigger a small quick time event-like sequence where you grasp the enemy by the throat and have to mash a button to fill the zombie meter. Making my way through the game, I discovered Zombie Impact is not the best option; Critical Zombie Impact is. Critical Zombie Impact is performed by beating an enemy with your attacks until they flash red, then using zombie impact. This turns them into a zombie instantly and recovers a bit of health for yourself. This is a crucial game play element as power up items in stages are sparse. Once you’ve turned the enemies to your legion of undead they will follow your every order, at least on paper. At times ordering your zombies around is akin to herding cats and will lead to some frustrating situations.

Controlling zombies is achieved by holding down the right shoulder button and moving a cursor to an object on the screen. In action this is cumbersome, and I would have preferred a toggle lock on available interactive objects. Meaning hold down the right shoulder button and the cursor locks onto the closest interactive object, then you press left, right, up, or down to cycle through all the interactive objects in your field of vision. Why? Because the battle is still raging on while you’re commanding zombies, and you can and will be attacked by enemy forces while you wait for your zombies to hop to action.

In addition to ordering zombies around, you can interact with them directly by pressing the circle button to grab a zombie. Once you’ve a zombie in hand you can – use them as an inhuman shield, toss the zombie at enemies or objects on screen (such as bothersome medieval landmines), or zombie crush them. Zombie crush is an area affect attack around your player character and immediately destroys the zombie being used. The zombie crush is also fun if you’re feeling frustrated and spiteful toward a particular enemy you’ve turned to your side. I’d often turn these trouble enemies into one of my undead and then zombie crush them out of spite. It’s counter productive to the objective of the game, but it feels good after you’ve had your hide beaten and stabbed by this particular foe.

You can purchase a skill for your player character called the Zombie Call which is performed by pressing the Right Trigger button and Circle. Unfortunately this isn’t a very fast or responsive move, at times the game will disregard your input in favor of the zombie army’s current pastime and if you’re in a tense situation this lack of responsiveness leads to additional frustration.

Along with the zombie call you can purchase additional character skills and moves with Dark Energy. Dark Energy is a currency doled out at the end of a stage after the tallying of the amount of souls you’ve collected and the total time it took you to clear the stage. More souls collected and lower stage play times will garner you a rank ranging from S, A, B, C – in Japanese fashion S rank is the highest despite it’s contradiction of the letter grading system I grew up with.

You gather souls a number of ways during the game. Defeating enemies with attacks or destroying objects earns you a white soul good for only Dark Energy at the end of a stage, green souls are found in pots on the stage and restore health, and red souls restore the Infernal Wrath gauge. If you use your legion of the undead to defeat an enemy you’ll obtain a soul bonus; but in the heat of battle this is more of a chore than you may want to contend with.

In the stages you’ll encounter a diverse roster of enemies: Standard knights, shielded knights which require a guard crush move to attack, archers which will require you use a zombie as a shield, knights on horse back with lances, giants, serpent men, etc. There’s a pretty wide variety of enemies and they’re all generally pretty eager to stab you and a fair number you can turn into zombies. It’s fun to see some of the larger enemies attacking on your behalf while you’re engaged in other activities. Some enemies can be a pain in the neck though, such as the knights on horse back. You’ll need to toss a zombie at them to knock them down, or perform a zombie crush near them to knock them from their mount. A few of the larger enemies also have an insane reach, which makes them difficult to attack since you need to throw zombies on to them to incapacitate them; and you’ll catch an axe with your head if you’re not careful.

There are also various siege engines on some stages, cannons and catapults. These can be bothersome as they target you specifically and you’ll need to make a mad dash to the other side of the stage, through waves of enemies, and other defensive structures in your path so that you’ll be out of the line of fire and set your zombie army to tearing the siege engines apart.

Oh and there are landmines. In medieval times. These are a nuisance as you’ll need to send your zombie running across them, or toss a zombie into them; and on some stages you’ll need to perform this while a catapult is lobbing boulders at your head. A little frustrating.

Voice acting is a mixed bag. The characters use English voice actors for cinematics; but in game will use some of the Japanese sound bites. This is evident when you fight a later female boss who has a husky English voice, but in game has the familiar high pitched Japanese female voice actor sound clips. All in all I’d say it’s solid, and I’m probably displaying a partial bias because I may never tire of Romulus’s threat of “Burn Fuckers, BURN!” when you perform his Infernal Wrath attack. He’s so metal.

The game features an interesting licensed black metal soundtrack from US acts Lightning Swords of Death and Valdur. Unfortunately after about ten stages I ended up muting the music. I’m not overly fond of black metal, and unlike music composed for a game, there was little variety or interesting use of the music other than blaring away in the background. Using musical cues to key a player to the changing tide of battle, when you’re near death, or other significant game related items would have been appreciated. It has worked well in games with similar mechanics. If you’re a fan of black metal, then definitely play the game with some headphones so you can enjoy the tunes.

Graphically the game gets the job done, it’s not a PSP showcase, but the frame rate is solid and the enemy characters are detailed enough to present a good amount of variety. Player characters have a nice amount of detail and their visual designs are different enough that each of them looks quite unique within the game world. Unfortunately there’s no facial animation for characters, so no moving mouths when characters are speaking; and the characters have a limited animation set during game engine cut scenes which can look silly at times as characters continue to gesture wildly as the story is unfolding.

When all is said and done, once you adapt to the game mechanics and pacing it’s a fun distraction. About ten stages in I felt the mechanics getting a little long in the tooth. Some greater variety in the missions would have been welcome. Perhaps some stages which didn’t rely on the zombie destroying / killing gimmick, just plain hack’n slash as a bit of a respite.

I would love to see zombie control better implemented in a sequel so that you wouldn’t need to constantly tend to their every move. Perhaps even use the D-pad to issue explicit orders to zombie troops and then they operate independent of player hand holding at all times. Think Zombie Knight in Treasure’s Guardian Heroes on the Sega Saturn. Additionally faster response times on the part of the zombies when using the zombie call option to call them to your side would alleviate a good deal of frustration a player will encounter.

The game is a total of 20 levels, four chapters with five stages each. It took 5 1/2 hours to complete the game for this review.

I really appreciate the very metal packaging of the game (story, music, presentation, themes); but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone on a whim. If you’re a fan of beat’em ups and are looking for something with a bit of a twist then give it a rent, or see if you can pick it up on the cheap somewhere. There’s a demo floating around on the Internet, so if you’re interested download it and give it a whirl first.

Thanks to Tecmo for providing a few hours entertainment, and thanks to Mark and Glenn for sending it my way.