It never fails. There's always one game at E3 that comes out of nowhere and just blows you away with how fun it looks. This year, I found that game tucked away in the HIP Games booth in the quieter section of Concourse hall. The game is George Romero's City of the Dead and though I sat down expecting nothing more than a lousy first-person shooter based on a pretty small license, once I watched it in action, I realized I had done City of the Dead an injustice. It, like the film universe it's based on, doesn't try to redefine a genre or be terribly groundbreaking in any way, instead, it just translates the goofy fun of George Romero's cult classic zombie movies into a game that's … well, a game that's basically about nothing more than killing lots and lots of zombies.

There are two basic rules you can count on in Romero's universe. First, the only way to truly kill a zombie is to destroy its brain. Otherwise no matter how many limbs you hack off or how much damage you do, they just keep coming. Second, there's no place in the world where you're truly safe. No matter where you hide, the zombies eventually find you. Sure they're slow and rather stupid, but the scary thing is, they never stop. Based on what I saw of the game's story mode, City of the Dead has done a great job of translating that sense of relentless, impending doom to a video game format. No matter how many you kill, there are always more, and if you stand still long enough, you will be surrounded and chomped on.


The game's big visual attraction is the physics engine which flings zombies realistically around based on point of impact. Naturally, this means that there will be a variety of classic weapons such as pistols, shotguns and rocket launchers to turn the zombies into so much zombie goulash. Since it takes a headshot to kill these things, the game also rewards good shots with a beautiful images of exploding heads using a slow motion "bullet-time" effect. Given how tough the zombies are, though, it'll take more than just a steady hand to take them out, though. That's why the environment is full of exploding things such as gas canisters, fuel drums and crates of explosives that can set off awesome chain reactions. Judicious use of these items will be vital in clearing out levels in story mode.

As much fun as story mode looks, though, it doesn't really hold a candle to the "One-shot" levels. These are bonus levels that are unlocked as the player goes through story mode. Obviously inspired by Burnout 3's crash challenges, the "One-shot" levels puts you in an enclosed space with a bunch of zombies wandering around and a gun with only one bullet. The challenge is to pick out the correct exploding device to shoot to set off a chain reaction that will kill as many zombies as possible in as entertaining a manner as possible. During my demonstration, the Kuju Entertainment developer who was showing off the game seemed to take enormous pride in the fact that he had found just the right spot to shoot to send one zombie over a burned out building. Sure enough, when he fired into a gas canister, he proceeded to launch the dead guy into the air. If his foot hadn't caught that exposed girder, he'd have made it -- of course, watching the zombie flip over the girder was good for a few laughs too.

City of the Dead will sport a multiplayer mode, but rather than just offer up a vanilla deathmatch capability, the game will instead sport a four-player co-op mode that works off the strengths of the setting. If a player gets bitten once during the game (as opposed to shot or hit), that's it, a countdown timer starts, the player dies, and turns into a zombie. That means that even though four players start the game together, eventually someone's going to end up a zombie -- and that's where the real fun starts. Players who become zombies will respawn as new zombies when they die and start hunting those who are still alive. They get all the strengths and weakness of the undead (slow speed and incredible resilience), so the game for the zombies becomes using their brains to set up ambushes for the human players. Look for George Romero's City of the Dead to hit PC, Xbox and PS2 at the end of March, 2006.