Welcome to ParadiZe Review

Player(s): 1
Extra Features: Online Co-op

Welcome to ParadiZe is a top-down zombie survival game developed by Eko Software. Eko was the developer of How to Survive. I’ve played How to Survive, but I can’t remember much of it. From what I remember of it, Welcome to ParadiZe is kind of similar. Welcome to ParadiZe is an RPG that encourages crafting and building while fighting hordes of zombies and collecting supplies. You can play the game either single player or in co-op play. Zombies can also fight alongside you with the use of special helmets. Overall, this game can be fun, depending on how much repetition you can take, but even then, the game is quite shallow in its features.

From the start, you get to pick from a list of characters and then you start your journey. The combat is actually quite nice from the beginning. You’ll take down zombies with a melee weapon a good bit of the time. You can also switch to projectile weapons for encounters. Some zombies require projectile attacks in order to damage them greatly. For instance, you’ll run into zombies with heavy armor that are strong versus melee but weak versus projectile. Aside from zombies, there is a slight emphasis on hunting animals.

A big part of the game is your zombie companion – your Zombot. By placing a helmet on a defeated zombie, you can get that zombie to fight with you. The Zombot is controlled by AI and you can equip the Zombot with armor and a weapon. You can also control the way the Zombot AI will act in situations somewhat. You can have the zombie heal your character, attack enemies, run from enemies when its HP is low and give it many other orders. For instance, you can have a zombie with spikes on him that will damage enemies from close range by touching them and then arm the zombie with a melee weapon and have him try to get the attention of surrounding zombies.

Eventually, you can have more than one Zombot. Zombots can help to take a lot of focus off the player. You can aim at enemies and then get your Zombot to attack them. Zombots are completely disposable. You can revive a Zombot once it falls or you can simply create a new Zombot from an enemy corpse.

There is also an emphasis on crafting and building. Crafting is mainly helpful for making healing items, items required for building and creating armor. You can construct a base in the game where you can gather resources and upgrade your gear. You’ll gain extra schematics for base building as your progress through the main story of the game.

Overall, objectives are your usual get from point A to point B, fetch and retrieve and protect a certain individual. Like I said earlier, this game starts out quite fun. The Zombot ally is a nice addition. Once crafting and building come into play, I started to feel the negatives of the game though. There is little point to building other than to satisfy objectives. I feel like most of the time, I’m just returning to my base just to create something to progress through the story. The base I constructed was just literally forgettable.

The overall Zombot AI is pretty bad as well. Even when I set them to only attack, they don’t really do much. For the most part, Zombots are mainly useful for taking attention off of your character during fights. I also get Zombots that get stuck behind objects at times. I’ll venture far into the map and see that my Zombot is stuck. Thankfully, this is usually corrected quickly be the Zombot respawning near me. The Zombot always felt like just like a slight distraction when fighting enemies. It never did feel very helpful. I feel like I’m doing most of the fighting myself aside from the Zombot killing a few enemies.

The overall weapons that you can get in the game are quite nice. You’ll get a variety of guns and melee weapons. I do like the gear that you can equip on your Zombot. You can equip the Zombot with fans that will keep you cool out in hot environments. There are also flamethrowers and other types of unique weapons that you can equip to your Zombot.

The gameplay feels a lot of like a Gauntlet game. You’ll find many enemies straggled around on the map and you’ll also find enemies that spawn from certain spawn points that you have to destroy in order to stop the enemies from respawning – I’m sure that sounds familiar! The game is overall not too hard, but it can have sudden difficulty spikes when fighting a horde or trying to get into an enemy base. When you die, you lose your current experience points, but you can go back to the place where you died and defeat your zombie body in order to regain the lost experience.

There are tons of variety in enemies. All enemies have a certain weakness that you’ll have to discover. One interesting enemy type was the zombie with a bee’s nest on it. The bees will nearly kill you instantly if you get near the zombie, so you have to shoot the zombie with a projectile weapon or have your Zombot attack it. Once the zombie falls, the nest will fall on the ground and will still damage you if you get near it. At that point, you have to get your Zombot to retrieve it and the nest will count as an item.

Welcome to ParadiZe is not a bad game, but it’s a game that is too shallow and repetitive to truly enjoy. If you can deal with the repetitive combat, you’ll go far in this game. I honestly did get addicted to it at times, but eventually gave up just to the overall repetition. It has a good variety of areas to discover on its map, but you’re just doing the same types of objectives throughout all of them.

The Good:
+ Somewhat addicting even with all the repetition
+ Quite a few weapons (both player and zombot weapons)
+ Many unique areas to explore (desert, forest, mall, town, etc)

The Bad:
- This game is repetitive. This game is repetitive. This game is repetitive.
- Zombot AI seems so bad. They don’t even want to attack much.
- Building is so shallow
- Objectives start to all feel the same (either talk to someone or collect something for someone)