Grand Theft Auto: Long Night review

[page=Grand Theft Zombie]

They mirror our society. They invade our homes. George Romero brought them out to meet us and now they are everywhere, from lunch boxes to comic books. While the modding scene has experienced its fair share of zombies, none of them have been like this.

A few things in your way.

The first thing that should stumble into your head as you load up this mod is: Why hasn't this been done before?

The idea is simple, yet full of great potential. Take your normal zombie mod, throw in about four hundred more zombies than are already present, and make the entire thing free roaming. Bam! Instantly something new and original. With the popularity of Grand Theft Auto and its successors, it is hard to believe that no one has latched onto this concept and brought it to life (haha) until now.

Imagine being free to roam in an entire city crawling with the undead. Imagine leaving the confines of the one safe haven left and seeing entire crowds of zombies heading towards you, lumbering faster and faster as they surround you. Imagine leaping up on top of your car, shooting wildly as the dead surround you, each of them reaching desperately for you, as you try to clear just enough zombies out of the way to make a mad run for it...

Grand Theft Auto: Long Night is Vice City without the traffic, the crime elements, and the excessive 80's flavoring. What's left is a city filled with zombies for you to fight your way through again and again, whether you like it or not. It is akin to playing a video game version of the best scenes in the Dawn of the Dead remake. Remember when they left the mall and the only thing their spotlights could see was an almost endless ocean of the undead? Oh yeah, it's like that.

Lets see them try to jack this.

You are cast in the role of a military grunt, sometime after the zombie madness has reached a high point. When the game plops you down and tells you to survive, most of the city has already been overtaken, including the military base youve been stationed at. The only safety left within Vice City is a former film studio lot, which police and special forces units have taken over and fortified. Getting there and keeping it safe, then, are now entirely up to you.

[page=Night of the Living Bread]

No need to panic, but--RUN!

At its most basic levels, Long Night is a load of fun. Though I didn't like the fact that the enemies were modeled after the 28 Days Later-style running zombies, I still loved fighting them. I mean, picture driving down the street, and having so many foes in front of you that you can't ram them all out of your path. Then, when you least expect it, one of them throws you out of the car onto the street. Moments like these are what should define the game, when you have to think on your feet to stay alive, using whatever resources are around you to keep the hordes of the undead at bay. At times like these, the mod is solid.

The game really begins once you reach the movie studio, which acts as the central hub for the rest of the game. Here, you can save your game and accept missions from other survivors by chatting with them. Some of the missions are geared towards helping the people survive (such as rescuing survivors, defending against violent groups of bikers, and retrieving supplies), while other missions act as flashbacks for the various characters.

Flashbacks add a nice element of depth to the game, allowing you not only to take control of other characters, but also to learn how other people came to survive the plague. Want to find out how the movie studio was secured? Talk to the SWAT team member. Curious as to what a pot head might get up to during the middle of a zombie attack? Chat with the stoner sitting on the UFO prop. Long Night also allows you to skip the somewhat non-linear missions and roam the city at your leisure. There isnt much out there to see, but the option is there and fun to exploit. Everything is kept reasonably Grand Theft Auto-esque, so long time fans of the series wont feel out of place.

Hey Dead-Head, come get some!

And youll especially feel at home once you get into the frustrating and hard as all hell missions that make up the majority of this game. I know it is not the fault of the mod developers, but the lack of an in-mission save feature frustrates me to no end. The game strikes an interesting balance between "rather hard" and "Oh for gods sakes, give me a damn break!" In one mission, I was tasked with securing some gasoline from Vice City's one fuel station on the opposite end of town. So, I jump into the helicopter, sit myself in front of the .50-caliber machine gun, and wait. Some five odd minutes later, the convoy comes under attack from a gang of bikers, which must be shot without blowing up their bikes, and without letting the bikers mow down the convoy on their own.

I mean, give me a break. And after I die and reload, do I have to sit for another five minutes before the action begins? You bet. One of the main reasons it took me so long to get this review out was just that I couldn't beat some of the damn missions in here!

Also worth noting is the fact that you just aren't given enough information on what to do in most missions. When the game opens, completely without explanation, you are told to head across town to gain control of a radio station. Why? I had no idea. But the game told me to, so I had to do it. What the game failed to tell me is that the radio station is being viciously guarded by a guy with a sawed-off shotgun, who coincidentally cannot be easily spotted next to the door as you enter. I seriously thought for ages that this was a glitch in the game, killing me off the second I walked in, until I read on a forum that there was actually a person there shooting me!

I also ran into pointless mission hot spots showing up for no apparent reason, objective items disappearing on me, and a total lack of cars in the game world.

That's right! This drove me up the wall. Where are all the abandoned cars? On a few occasions, youll see a vehicle parked in the middle of the road, or left astray near your mission objectives, but otherwise....nothing. The streets of Vice City are bare and empty, aside from the great crowds of the undead.

Crunch.

Shouldn't I be dodging lots of parked cars while navigating this ruined town? And with that, why no real destruction at all? The town looks clean, crisp, and beautiful to me, aside from the occasional corpse littering the sidewalk. And while this sounds like a minor complaint, it turns out to have a big impact on game play. I mean, think about it. When the zombies throw you out of your car, where do you go? There aren't any others around, so you better find a way to lure them away from the car so you can retake it, otherwise you might be walking halfway across the map.

[page=When Good Times Go Bad]

Ah, home away from home.

Do you get the feeling that for every good thing about this mod, there always seems to be a but?

Since you spend the majority of the game running the hell away from them, you wont ever really see the zombies up close, unless you get yourself eaten. This is a shame, because I think the zombie models are some of the nicest and most detailed I've seen in a game. They aren't Doom 3 quality, but it looks to me like a lot of time was spent making them different from one another. Also, the game features a shadowy darkness for the environment, which works well enough, but crept around a bit on my screen in weird ways, reminding me of the way Fog of War works in a lot of strategy titles. Maybe it was just me, but I constantly felt like it was dancing around my character. But perhaps that is just the night time at work.

The radio stations have also been changed, as VROCK is taken over at the beginning of the game by you! Now, tuning into the station features a long series of broadcasts about the zombie outbreak, which Ive been told adds a lot of atmosphere and humor to the game. However, like many other fans, I couldnt get the bloody thing to work in-game, and had to listen to it on my desktop later, to find out what I was missing.

And aside from that, there isnt a whole lot of new content here. Everything else was presumably taken from the original game, such as character textures, weapons, sound clips, vehicles, everything. Its too bad that enough time wasnt spent making this version of Vice City their own, because it really would have made this feel like a totally unique experience, rather than just adding zombies to a pre-existing environment.

Way to guard the empty room, there, Tex.

And really, that says a lot about Long Night, a mod which by all accounts had great potential. When you are in the middle of a mission, driving around a squealing squad car to distract the zombies so another survivor can escape, you are going to love how clever the fun the game is. Yet when you keep dying on the same tedious mission, or get abandoned in the middle of the city with no clear direction as to where you need to go and with no car to do it with, you are going to be annoyed. With every positive this game seems to spit out, there is always this nagging but hanging around in the background.

Is Long Night worth playing? Definitely. I would argue that it is the best mod out there for Vice City, aside from maybe Multi-Theft Auto, and one of the most inventive zombie mods I have run across in ages. But at the same time, the bulk of it needs to be taken with a grain of salt. You will have fun, but you may have to work for it. While maybe not for everybody, Long Night is still a great change of pace for the zombie mod genre in general and Vice City fans in particular.

Just expect to get stuck a lot.

---Score Box---

Design: 2 out of 5

If anything deserves a low score here, it is in the design category. A lot of good ideas are in evidence here, but many of them just arent implemented exceptionally well. We have a whole city of the dead to roam through, but there is nothing out there to find, least of all being the vehicles that you could actually use to get around. Worse: Most of the missions are barely explained and just plain tedious to play through.

Graphics: 3 out of 5

While the majority of the graphics are just ported straight over from the original Vice City, the new things in evidence really shine. The zombies look great and the new player models (those not stripped from the original game, mind you) are ridiculously well done. Throw in some disturbing looking menus and youve got yourself a decent, if dated, looking mod.

Sound: 3 out of 5

While the sound category features even less new content than the Graphics one, the new stuff is again quite well done. The new VROCK station is perfect for the game, being both funny and disturbing, while setting the mood as great as the shadowy night atmosphere. Still, the game would have faired better with some actual voice acting thrown in, or some zombie sounds, or just...something more.

Game play: 4 out of 5

When it works, it just works. Long Night is fast paced and exciting. Yes, it can become hard, and yes, the occasional glitch can screw up your sense of direction or focus in a mission, but man is it exciting. Screw fighting two or three zombies at a time! I want a whole crowd of them surrounding me, forcing me to dodge and weave for my life! If I have to leap up onto my car, dive off, and sprint for the nearest alley way because I have nowhere else to go, the dev's are doing something right.

Final Score: 60% (or 12 out of 20 pts)

All images provided were taken by ModDB.com Staff Members with FRAPS.