Review by: Michael Barnes

If you’ve ever thought it would be cool if a PSX-era Twisted Metal game had zombies in it, then Blood Drive might be a game for you…as long as fun, polish, and creativity aren’t high on your list of desired qualities.

It turns out that the mash-up of car combat and undead apocalypse is more of a milk-and-pickles proposition than a peanut butter-and-chocolate one. Conceptually, the result is a shockingly bare-bones demolition derby-style game with oddly ineffectual weapons and special abilities with some zombies ambling around, waiting for you to plow through them. It doesn’t really make sense, regardless of the sparse framing story that uses the old “crazy, blood-soaked game show of the future” trope that is starting to become as overused as zombies themselves. What’s worse is that the whole concept of zombies becomes less scary when all they do is beat on your armored truck before you run them over. It just doesn’t work, and it simply isn’t any fun.

Games in the past have done the whole death race thing well—Carmageddon springs to mind, but games like that had a mischievous sense of social irresponsibility. Even the Grand Theft Auto games, where you can hit the sidewalk and plow through a throng of pedestrians have that naughty feeling of doing something that in the real world would be truly evil. Zombies change that paradigm. One of the interesting subtexts to the popularity of zombies, particularly in the kinds of films and games that they have been in over the past decade is that they represent a kind of socially permissible murder fantasy. It’s OK (and heroic, even) to chop up, shoot, dismember, and mow down already dead human beings with a car.

So it winds up, in Blood Drive’s case, that killing “zeds” feels strangely like a boring chore, particularly since they do not represent much of a threat and you can simply drive forward and then reverse over and over again and slaughter them by the hundreds since they have no AI programming other than to converge on a car. There are special zombies, most of which Left 4 Dead fans will recognize, that are more of a danger than the rank-and-file chompers, but they add little variety to the gameplay or strategy. Of course, the rival vehicles don’t feel like much of a threat either as the weapons lack any sense of power or variety…so expect to do a lot of ramming. You’d think that a saw blade launcher would be pretty neat. But like the rest of the game, it just isn’t.

Incongruous concept aside, the gameplay in Blood Drive is terribly dated and it lacks any degree of depth or engagement. It literally plays like a PSX title with slightly updated graphics, but given the constantly chugging frame rate and frequent pop-in, it’s hardly on par with today’s games. Controls are abysmal. I swear that I’ve driven bumper cars down at the state fair that had better acceleration, handling, and braking. This makes the checkpoint races frustrating, and trying to line up to fire a weapon or to run over a crowd of zombies is way more difficult than it should be. The terrain also causes some serious control issues. It’s easy to get stuck and if you drive over the wrong piece of terrain, suddenly your car jerks to one side or the other and you’re off course. It’s incredibly irritating.

There is a campaign mode that features eight distinct characters, each with a different vehicle and a unique shtick and it uses a traditional points-based system for ranking. Finish the series at number one, and another set of events is unlocked. The final level is some 30 events long, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone in the world who plays this unfortunate game will have the patience or fortitude to get through that mess. The events are uninspired and mind-numbingly dull. There are competitions to kill the most zombies or enemy vehicles, dreadful checkpoint rallies, survival contests, and score battles. These events, none of which are any fun, carry over to the single player challenge modes and the multiplayer options.