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Slaughtering zombies should never get old. One of the last groups still politically correct to massacre, there's something pleasing about defending humanity from a horde of the undead. Unfortunately, the more you progress in Trapped Dead, the more you'll be rooting for the zombies.

Trapped Dead, developed by Headup Games and published by Meridian4, attempts to pay homage to old 80s B-movies. The story is told through comic-style cut scenes during and between missions, and follows a college-aged guy named Mike as he discovers a tiny Kansas town overrun by zombies. With a handful of other survivors, he needs to fight through the horde, find the secrets as to how this outbreak happened, and ultimately escape with his skull intact.
The presentation of the story is mediocre, but it works for the premise. The voice acting borders on atrocious, full of more cheese than a fondue bowl. I'm willing to assume this was entirely intentional, though; just wait until you hear the overly dramatic doctor, who enjoys saying "damn" every other sentence as he complains about looking for other survivors. Each character has an over-the-top personality, and their one-liners are hilariously bad. That same doctor enjoys spouting the line "Have a taste of MY medicine!" after executing a zombie. The zombies themselves groan and moan when they spot you, and their bodies explode in a shower of gore like a blood-filled balloon. Beating a zombie to death on the ground with a baseball bat is immensely satisfying in a primal, animalistic way.
Trapped Dead is a third-person action game with an isometric view, with all the fighting happening in real-time, though you can pause at any time to give commands. You order your survivors (a team of four out of a possible six characters) to move around the stages with simple left-clicks, while right-clicks order them to attack. I prefer it when action games don't force puzzles down your throat, and Trapped Dead never does, keeping the focus on the fighting.
Unfortunately, once you're past the presentation and are required to see the game in action, things start to fall apart like a zombie's flesh. You won't see any crashes, but frustration will set in early because it's necessary to give the exact same command two or three times before it "takes." Pathfinding is usually well done, but the act of attacking is extremely inconsistent. Sometimes, your chosen character will attack immediately. Other times, he'll wait until he's hit first. Still other times, he won't attack at all, forcing you to give the command again.

Trapped Dead is supposed to feature teamwork among your survivors, but that's made difficult by screwy AI. For example, by holding Shift and dragging a rectangle around a group of zombies, you essentially tell your character to stand still and attack the whole group, targeting the closest one. However, if you have a second character targeting the same group and one of the zombies dies, you have about a 50/50 shot of one your survivors giving up the attack entirely and ignoring the rest of the group. Worse still, the targeting symbol (a simple halo around the targeted zombies) won't disappear when the bug strikes, so you'll have no idea when or why it happens.
Complicating matters is that the zombies are a little too stupid. Sure, they're mindless and all, but a frequently easy tactic to survive if you get overwhelmed is to simply run to another room. The zombies, once they lose sight of whoever they're targeting, tend to just break away and wander or go back to where they started. Through judicious use of hiding around a corner and smart pulling tactics, you can usually pick off the zombies one at a time with melee weapons, allowing you to get through an entire level merely by using one survivor with a bat. Some mini-boss-like zombies are fairly strong and won't be taken down so easily, but the majority of the horde will fall prey to simple stick-and-move tactics.
What's especially frustrating about the zombie AI is that it's not always that passive. When your characters take enough damage (a nebulous, inconsistent amount that's not displayed and seems to frequently change), they will start to bleed. At that point, the zombies can smell you, even from multiple rooms away, and will start to converge. It's the other end of the pendulum: either the zombies are overly aggressive and seem to be psychic, or they're overly passive and will quickly lose interest once they can no longer see you. It makes the game swing from being a little too hard to a little too easy all based on whether a given attack happens to make a character bleed.
The zombies hit pretty hard and are fairly challenging if you get ganged up on, but there is never any incentive to actually attack any of them. Each survivor has unique stats (health, stamina, gun accuracy, etc.), but there is no RPG-like progression. I'm not one of those gamers who believes every game needs RPG stats and skills, but given that you getnothing for killing the zombies, there is little incentive to actually try. Instead, you'll find yourself just walking around them and avoiding them as much as possible unless you go out of your way from the mission objectives, which is a bizarre design choice for an action game.

Not helping matters is an archaic save system that has little place in modern gaming. Each stage has save points, but they're poorly balanced within a level. The prison stage is the earliest offender: the first save point might take you 15 to 20 minutes to get to, and the second save point comes about 45 seconds afterwards. You'll usually get a save point right before a particularly challenging room, but other times you'll see one in the middle of nowhere. The specific locations of the save points wouldn't be so bad, except they can only be used once per stage. Loading from one of these points brings its own bugs: while any bleeding character will magically be healed, the entire team's weapons will suddenly unequip. You luckily don't lose the weapons, but if a zombie was chasing you at the moment the game saved, he might get several free hits against you when you load.
There is multiplayer, up to four players each controlling one of the survivors, but the Steam forums feature several players complaining that it wasn't working for them. I had no problems with my connection once I found a game, but I had to wait awhile before I found an interested party. Unless you can find some friends who are into the game too, you probably shouldn't count on too much co-op. Even if you do manage to get a game going, exploiting the passive zombie AI becomes even easier, and playing becomes less a fight for desperate survival and more an exercise in tedium.
THE VERDICT
Trapped Dead has some good ideas and its low price tag (a mere $10 on Steam) may be very tempting. Killing the first few zombies in the tutorial level alone shows the violence and tactical planning that could have made the game something special. As you progress however, all the bugs, all the inconsistent controls, all the unbalanced gameplay, and the awful checkpoint system completely ruin the experience. As of this writing, there is a patch in the works, but Trapped Dead ultimately feels like an unfinished game
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