Deadman’s Cross review: collecting the undead is not as fun as it sounds

Square Enix has done the impossible. The famed game company has combined FPS gameplay elements with a card game battle system set in a zombie apocalypse, and made it too boring to play.

Deadman’s Cross takes place three months after the zombie outbreak begins, and already the world is desolate. The game starts with you picking off undead with your rifle in the hunting grounds, and then a young boy named Oliver runs you through your basic tutorial. He takes you to the bar where you can take on quests for money. Oliver also teaches you how to strengthen your deadman card deck, and even takes you to the battle arena where you can use your card deck to fight other players. Oliver’s kind of a nice guy huh.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit. Once you shoot down a zombie in the hunting grounds, you get to collect it in a card form, and then use it in battle later. Kind of like a zombie version of Pokemon. After you kill enough, you can form a deck of up to ten cards that you can then use in the battle arena or on side quests to fight off opponents. I’m not terribly sure why you wouldn’t just use your rifle during the side quests, but we’ll just let that one slide.

Through hunting, you are bound to get duplicates of your zombies, or even a surplus of weak cards. What do you do with the extra cards? Sacrifice them of course. As with games with a typical card collection element, your weaker zombies can be fed to the stronger ones in order to level up your deck.

The game does sound interesting enough. Picking off zombies through a scope and then using them in card battles should be a winning formula, but unfortunately Square Enix’s Deadman’s Cross just falls short of fun.

The card battles are all simulated, which means once you run into a zombie in a quest, you simply watch your zombies cards take on and give damage. No strategy whatsoever. Just a simple waiting game. Sure you can collect cards to build a strong deck, but if the battle system is weak and boring, what’s the point?

What’s worse is that even the hunting aspect of the game lacks the thrill and excitement that should be felt when gunning down zombies. Each zombie is made up of a dark outline that stumbles around the street until you shoot at it. You do not get to see what you are hunting until you’ve already spent time and ammo on the kill. You could spend your entire hunt gunning down useless zombies, and not have anything of worth to take away from it.

Once hit, the zombie will turn red, take notice of you, and start attacking. Honestly, this is the most entertaining aspect of the game. However it is very limited.

Each hunt is restricted to one minute, and you are only allotted one hunt a day. Unless you want to spend real cash, the only semi-entertaining part of the game is restricted to 60 seconds every twenty four hours. Sure, you can unlock hunting tickets by completing certain tasks, but realistically, you get just one hunt.