Nation Red

Developer: DiezelPower | Publisher: DiezelPower | Release Date: 2010 | Genre: Action / Shooter / Indie | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

Zombies are typically slow, shambling, stupid creatures that pose little problems to well-armed individuals. Unfortunately, you will not find any of those types of zombies in Nation Red. Instead, the ones you’ll face in this game have no problem sprinting or wielding weapons. There is some story involving zombies that showed up in the late seventies only to be wholly eradicated, making a return thirty years later. They are now better armed and thirsty for vengeance, so you will need all the weapons you can get and, hopefully, the backup of a few friends.

Nation Red is an arena-based shooter in the mold of genre classics like Crimson Land, where your only purpose is to survive the close-quarter fighting with zombies for as long as possible. The game features several different modes as well as difficulty levels, but it is definitely the most fun in co-op with friends, which can be done locally or online. Solo players looking for a story won’t find one here, although there is a “Mission” mode where you have to kill a certain amount of zombies across 18 different missions. These missions can then be retried and become progressively harder each time, which is a nice touch. Other modes include free play, where you play until you die; survival, the same thing without the perks; and barricade, where you must survive and protect your barricaded area. Most of these modes can also be played in co-op, along with a king of the hill mode where you compete with your fellow players instead of working with them.

The arenas in Nation Red are pretty small, so you need to be accurate with your aim and quick with your feet to survive the hordes of zombies that keep pouring in. In addition to the mutant zombies, you will eventually begin to encounter a couple of bosses, which are special zombies that wield grenades, machine guns, or other lethal weapons. These guys soak up a ton of damage before they go down and can quickly turn the tide against you in barricade mode. If you survive long enough, it is not uncommon to see a bunch of them showing up simultaneously, which really increases the challenge.

Shooting zombies is fun, but Nation Red would not have been half as addictive if it wasn’t for the great selection of perks and weapons you have at your disposal. In addition to the type of character you pick, each of whom has its strengths and weaknesses, your choice of guns and perks can make each round unique.

In total, there are almost one hundred perks to earn, including a couple of very neat ones. Whether you want to attract power-ups and weapons toward your character, improve your accuracy, push enemies back when they hurt you, or even increase your speed while walking backward, you’ll find something among the perks.

Perks are earned each time you gain enough experience points from shooting zombies, and unlike power-ups, they don’t expire after a short amount of time. There are some really unique perks, like the “Hand of God,” which strikes enemies down from the sky, and “Saw Blades,” where you automatically shoot out triple boomerang saw blades at regular intervals. Many of the perks work well in conjunction, so half the fun is figuring out which ones to pick. If you prefer not to pick or don’t want the distraction of having the action pause while you choose a perk, you can also opt for “Auto Perk,” whereby the game automatically picks ones from your list of favorites. Speaking of choosing, you can opt for either “Random Perk,” where you always get a list of seven random ones to choose from each time you level up, or “Strategic Perk,” where you get the pick from the entire list. The difference is that with the random perks, you have no limit, whereas the strategic ones give you more versatility but penalize you with a maximum limit of twenty perks.

A top-down shooter like Nation Red is only as good as its weapons, but thankfully, the game does a stellar job in this regard. You can wield two weapons at a time and have guns and melee weapons at your disposal. The melee ones consist of axes, crowbars, and machetes, while the guns range from a puny Glock 19 all the way to flame throwers, nail guns, M4A1 Carbines, shotguns, and even a minigun. There is an impressive list of firearms that fallen zombies can randomly drop, and picking them up is as easy as walking over them. Obviously, you don’t always want to exchange your minigun for a crowbar, so to prevent this from happening, you can press a key to lock your current weapon in place. This will cause your character to ignore all other weapons in the arena, which is helpful.

Like most games of this type, Nation Red can be played with your keyboard and mouse or as a twin-stick shooter if you have an analog controller. Either method works great, although we preferred the accuracy of the mouse when it came to thinning out the zombie hordes. Apart from buttons for shooting, using grenades, reloading your weapon, and locking your gun in place, your character can also jump to roll out of harm’s way. This sounds like a lot of buttons to keep track of in the heat of battle, but it only takes a few rounds for it all to feel very intuitive.

In terms of visuals, Nation Red is starting to show its age, but it is still not a bad-looking game. The bosses are quite cool, but the basic zombies are pretty much just fodder for your weapons. All the zombies you shoot die in a shower of blood that stays on the ground, so things can quickly become chaotic, especially with explosions going off and three other players joining in on the mayhem. The game is viewed from a top-down perspective, but you can also move the camera up or down a bit to suit your preferences. Levels consist of a warehouse, gas station, cemetery, oil platform, farm, prison, and a few others. Each of the four character classes, sniper, gunner, medic, and scout, also have their own distinct look. The game favors loud, crushing riffs for audio, which is a good match for the brutal action. The sound effects are also loud and booming, which is perfect for a zombie shooter. If you opt for online co-op, though, you will have to turn down the volume of the music and sound effects if you want to hear what your teammates are saying.

While Nation Red shines as a multiplayer game, it still offers plenty of value for money regarding single-player content. The missions can all be completed in less than an hour, but with more than 100 Steam Achievements and a dozen leaderboards, there is always something to challenge you. Increasing the difficulty level also makes for much more tense games once you have improved your skills. The only real downside to Nation Red, typical for games in this genre, is that it can become somewhat repetitive after a while. However, it is also one of those games that you’ll find yourself returning to once in a while to try and earn a new achievement or take down some zombies with friends. All of this makes it more than worth the very modest price tag.