They say war is hell, and that's even without someone trying to eat your brains. In WootraGames' shooter/defense hybrid Carveola Incident, you play Sgt. Kirley, a man ordered after the war to join up with former enemy soldiers and defend a massive trench in the middle of nowhere. But what's at the center? And who are you defending it from? I'll give you a hint; it starts with a "Z" and ends with a "MY FLESH, MY FLESH, YOU'RE CHEWING ON MY SUCCULENT FLE-HE-HEEESSSSH!"
The lion's share of the gameplay is given over to something like a first person shooter, with you able to run back and forth along the trench while your fellow soldiers hold their ground and fire at anything that comes within range. Your cursor is a crosshair, so just point and click to fire at incoming shamblers. To begin with, most zombies will only require one shot to the head to go down, but as the levels progress, they'll get stronger, and start to appear in greater variety. Some levels are even fought at night, which greatly decreases your visibility. You can see where the zombies are appearing via the little map in the upper right corner, so you'll know where you should be headed to if they start to get too close. (If things get really desperate, you can even call in a little aerial reinforcement.) You can have a total of twenty soldiers on your side, but they won't be enough to protect every section of the trench, so you'll need to keep moving and keep shooting if you want to hold the line.
You can manually place each soldier where you want him before each stage, but because it's impossible to predict where zombies are going to appear, it's faster and just as effective to hit "random" and then arrange if necessary for even dispersal along the trench. If you do lose a soldier to the unfortunate trait of having flesh too tasty for his own good, you can easily replace him between battles, where you spend money on new weapons and new recruits, some of them more effective than others. Hey, it could be worse; thank goodness we're not being attacked by a lot of broad-sided barns or we'd really be done for.
Analysis: While you can't say Carveola Incident is particularly original, being a blend of several genres we see done fairly frequently, the execution is handled quite nicely. It's great to play a defense/shooter where you feel like you're actually vital to your own success, rather than running around like a gimmicky little gopher while the game handles everything for you. The actual story here at work is delivered in tiny snippets of text between each level, and while it may be doled out a bit too slowly for some, it does a good job of creating an air of mystery surrounding the whole event, especially coupled with the black-and-white film grain aesthetic.
The combat is fairly solid and reliable, if unvaried. If your hand is even moderately steady, pegging headshots on zombies even at a long distance is easy, and you'll probably go quite a few levels without a single enemy getting anywhere near brain-eating distance. (Twelve levels in my case.) What the game winds up feeling like it desperately needs is more variation; after a while the monotone colour scheme can get to you, and you're really going to want some different enemies to shake things up. It feels like the game could have been half as long and been stronger for it by cutting out a lot of the identical stages and just making the rest longer to compensate for cash. If we've already proven that we can deal with your crawling zombies just as easily as the others, do we really need to prove it for four more levels before you start adding new ones to the mix?
And, okay, while we're at it, we might as well mention that the concept does sort of resemble that one chapter from that one book you're contractually obligated to read if you've ever been in the same vicinity as someone watching a zombie movie. But Carveola Incident is an entertaining variant on a genre that's been done to death and back again, and, while not particularly complex, offers a satisfying chunk of head-shootin' action for those of us who just don't feel right with the world until we've done our part to stem the undead threat.
They're coming to get you, Kirrrrrley!
Seemed good at first, but the "difficulty curve" involved a little too much collision detection via ill-tempered 5-year-old:
Player: "I hit that guy in the face."
Game: "NUH-UH!"
Player: "Um, yes I did. Look, I'll do it again; he's still a way off."
Game: "MISSED AGIN, DOODY HED!"
Player: Um, look, the crosshairs are right over his face. You can see the crosshairs' color contrast changing as they hover over his head, so you know the shot is dead on, since he's much closer now. This shot should hit him. I hit him dead bang."
Game: "DID NOT! YOU SCUK!"
Player: "Aaand, now he's eating my guys. Nuts to this."
Until they fix it so that a hit is actually a hit, not a random decision about whether you're allowed to hit or not, I think I'll avoid it.
[I didn't encounter that problem at all. Keep in mind not all enemies are one-hit kills even if you get them in the head. I'm not exactly a crack-shot, but I'm pretty sure any misses I had were my fault. I'm sorry you're encountering difficulties. :( -Dora.]
Not bad, but it had a laundry list of annoying features that took me out of it.
1. My men go down to a single zombie bite. Zombies take multiple headshots before dying. Of all the conventions in zombie games and FPS games, headshot = death is probably the most common one in existence.
2. Zombies with all of their limbs intact are the slowest. Zombies without an arm go faster. Zombies missing both legs are the fastest of all. What?
3. Artillery strikes take so long to fire for so little benefit. Why would you bother? Presumably they're meant to take out a dense cluster of zombies, but that never happens.
4. Why the heck are we in a trench at all? Trenches are designed to protect you from ranged attacks, and last time I checked, zombies don't have guns.
How does one rack up a big score in the Campaign mode? I finished and I was now where near the middle of the pack. I only had 4 lost men and lots of cash left.
My thoughts/issues:
1) the artillery attacks are somewhat useless. The Howitzer should be more of a direct hit since the model shown is more of a gun vs. mortar attack which would cover an area.
2) why is the most expensive gun relatively weaker than the middle of the road? It seems that with the average damage at 50 that the firing rate should be more than 2x faster than the gun with the 100 damage factor.
3) The french soldiers appear to be the best value for money - again, cost benefit indicates that they have a good firing rate and good damage despite the reduced accuracy
4) the process of selecting a mortar attack is awkward since the screen moves when you go to select an attack - how about a hot key for each type of attack?
5) there is no way to see how much damage has been done to a zombie - maybe it's just me but I hate wasting attacks on a target that a single shot could fix.
6) do you get more points/money for taking out targets vs. your team? It seems that relying on your troops is not the best course of action.
Anyway, I think I've said enough...
I love to play the WWII era games, but found it funny this game claimed it was 1918, but yet they had 1942 machine guns... I didn't look up the dates, but I think some of the artillery was post 1918 era too. Somehow the alternate timeline had better weapons earlier...
That said, the scrolling to get to the next zombie is awkward and artillery strikes weren't as simple as they should have been (see previous posters). I also found it funny your men were more likely to be able to see a zombie off in the distance before you were.
Wow, first time I've not found a game hard and other people did! It's always the other way around. Any who, the only thing I had a problem with was the incredibly slow scroll speed. When you spot a zombie on the map on the other side of the screen it can seem an age until you get to it. Other than that, and how short it was, pretty enjoyable game. The hit detection was pretty solid for me at least, and I ended up making enough money to have full everything a few missions in.
The artillery doesn't seem that effective at first, but I found it important to my strategy because a single click lays down a barrage 7,8 nine times.
(takes his two cents and tosses it into the pot :)
I've had the same issues as the others -- but JiGGuest up there in the #1 spot had me laughing out about it. (I think it was the DOODY HED and YOU SCUK that got me)
the flaky controls and hit detection, we've reached the point where instead of OH Cool! Another zombie game!BRAAAAAIIIIINS!
It's gotten to joy. another zombie game. Wonder what's on TV?
Personally I found the game to be quite easy. I found the German soldiers to be the most effective, and pretty much loaded up on them as quickly as I could so that my entire squad was German soldiers and two machine gunners. Then I just spaced them out as evenly across the map as possible and that pretty much kept my covered. Not even the big guys posed much of a threat or got close enough to do damage, and I only lost one soldier the whole game, and that was pretty early on.
I didn't even bother with unlocking the last two guns since they weren't powerful enough to bother, but since I had the money available I unlocked all the artillery, although I think I only used it three times the whole game.
I don't know...maybe I was doing it wrong? :P
Well, nice game overall, well put together, only thing I noticed, the creatoer should adress to is:
- you should limit the times you can reload per.. well reload, I mean, if you press reload more then once then it just stacks over the reload and just eats away your time
I agree there should be hot keys for the artilery strikes. you move the cursor up to the gun, and the whole screen moves away from the cluster of zombies youre trying to get(though ive only ever seen 1 big cluster) when you clik on it and get back to the zombies, there already eating youre mens brains.
and... why can you only have 20 men? i mean the presidents(or chancelors or czars or prime ministers, whatever they had back then) obviously know something big is happening why would they put former eneimies together only a few days after the war. So.. if they knew something bad was happening, why cant they send lots of men?
I realized that spacing out my men was a bad idea because they don't really help each other. Instead I packed my men relatively close on the right side while taking care of the left side so I didn't have to scroll.
Artillery strikes are so small and precise...I don't think that works for that time period. I agree with previous posters that they need hotkeys too.
I also want to point out that fire rate it shows for buying your own guns are inverted for some reason...the lower it says the fire rate is, the more faster you can fire.
The thompson has the lowest fire rate on the board but it's a machine gun! What?
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