Computer Game Review: Nation Red (2009)

Nation Red is a top-down shooter released back in 2009. What originally attracted me to this game was the survival element of being in an arena and fending off wave after wave of zombie. While Nation Red delivered in this, I did find the whole experience lacking over other, similar games out there.

There isn’t much of a story to this game. You start the game by choosing one of four classes (Medic, Gunner, Sniper or Scout) and are then put in the game. You use WASD to move, and the mouse to aim and shoot. There are some good mechanics here, such as reduced speed backpedalling. However, there are also allot of annoying mechanics. The fact you move incredibly slow with a melee weapon makes them nearly useless (for me anyway). As you kill Zombies, you get experience to pick perks (such as getting a free grenade every 30 seconds) which you deal with the increasing number of zombies.

 

And that really is all there is to the game. Single player consists of these arena’s and a specific wave to survive to. In multiplayer, up to 4 players each choose a class and go at it. The maps have a bit of variety but all boil down to the same thing: some zombie spawn points and some walls with a different texture on top. Sometimes the objectives change, as you have to hold zombies off a certain area or defend a structure in the middle. However, the gameplay and strategy remain the same throughout and most players just end up camping the spawn points. The small online community and only handful of maps doesn’t help as maps are simply repeated throughout. There are the possibilities of deeper tactics and teamwork, but for the most part this is what most online games boil down to.

 And at Nation Red’s core, that is it’s main problem. There is no sense of progression as you go through the levels and at the end you lose most of your progress. It would have been cool to pick some permanent wargear or passive perks for your character (kind of like X-Com) as you slowly level up your character.

That being said, it is still fun to jump on for a game or two of Nation Red every so often. It is hectic survival-type gameplay. However, I feel that this game had allot more potential than how it turned out, The addition of some persistent skills or customization for your character or some more varied missions would have done the game a world of good. At the moment, it is only good for some arcade-type action, but gets repetitive quite quickly.

2 out of 5 re-animated red waffles.