Welcome to ParadiZe review

The Zombie Apocalypse is hardly a new setting for video games. Or films and TV. Or books, for that matter. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different takes out there detailing such calamities with varying degrees of silliness. But there are few zombie stories that take the direction Welcome to ParadiZe has. This tongue-in-cheek isometric survival game comes to us from the studios behind the cult How to Survive games, and it shows, as it presents a vision of the Zombie Apocalypse as daft as it is entertaining.

In Welcome to ParadiZe the world is already buggered. Zombies have wrecked everything and the rich have pissed off to live in a new habitat on the moon. For those few survivors left on Earth, there is only ParadiZe, a walled-off Utopia where technology has allowed us to make servants of the undead hordes. As the game begins, your chosen survivor has made their way to PAradiZe to find it not exactly like the brochures.

Zombies still run amok, given that the brain control tech is not quite there, and most of the human survivors who live here are, well, a few chickens short of a henhouse. If you’re to survive in this batshit world, you’ll need to construct weapons and armour, build a settlement that acts as a homebase, and learn to control and utilise your own “Zombots”, mind-controlled zombies who’ll fight for you, pick flowers for you, blow themselves up for you, or even give you piggy-back rides everywhere.

It’s hard to quantify Welcome to ParadiZe for several reasons. Firstly, it’s incredibly, almost unashamedly janky. It crashes quite often, for one thing. My character once fell through the floor in a never-ending death-dive until I alt-tabbed out and quit, for another. There’s nothing I can do to get rid of the screentear or stop-start framerate. It’s a technical shambles to rival the decaying fiends at the centre of its story – and yet it’s also really bloody playable.

Like How to Survive before it, ParadiZe refuses to take itself seriously. This is no meditation on the futility of survival, no musing on the supposed tragedy that humans are the real monsters in a zombie apocalypse, no characters to get attached to and no hard moral choices to make. This is a game where you can ride one zombie into a pack of other zombies and scatter them like bowling pins. It’s a game where you can attach massive spikes to your Zombot’s clothing and watch other zombies wander into him and get instantly diced. It’s a game where fresh zombies are spat out of giant pneumatic tubes until you shut them down to prevent the spawning. It’s weird and fucking silly – and I’m absolutely here for it.

There’s an overarching plot about reaching the moon that may or may not be poppycock, and to accomplish your goal you’ll need to navigate this strange world where roaring hot desert sits literally across the road from dense forest, and human survivors exist in their own little pockets of civilisation, served by brainwashed zombies, and like nothing better than to give you fetch quests.

As an isometric action game Welcome to ParadiZe offers an enjoyable addictive gameplay loop that sees you hoovering up endless resources, crafting weapons, first aid items, ammo, and armour, all to get strong enough to keep doing it. Combat is surprisingly meaty, with satisfying feedback on both melee weapons like machetes and baseball bats, but also on air-powered shotguns, crossbows, longbows, and, eventually, actual guns.

Zombies fly apart with relative ease, and if you knock them down you can either finish them off messily or force a mind-control harness onto their heads and “recruit” them. Killing hostile zombies will drop their equipment, and picking it up fills a progress bar that eventually allows you to craft the item and equip it on your Zombot. It’s a fun mechanic that means you’re always progressing.

While you’re shooting, swinging, and dodge-rolling around the place, you’ll earn XP to unlock skills in three different skill trees. These focus on hacking Zombots, combat, and survival, and while there’s not a great scope for full-on build-crafting, there are enough skills and abilities to shape your survivor in a certain way.

It can be a tough game, though, which kind of necessitates playing with a friend. You can absolutely tackle the whole game solo, but be prepared to get overwhelmed a lot. Death simply respawns you with zero cost, though, so don’t worry too much. While it’s built around creating a working base with other players, it feels like a game you should play at your own pace, exploring, crafting, and progressing through the straightforward but bonkers campaign.

Welcome to ParadiZe is a game that feels way more enjoyable than you might expect it to. It’s technically weak and occasionally ugly to look at, but it has a great sense of humour and satisfying combat and crafting systems that elevate it above the surface jank. It’s a game for putting your feet up and having fun with, untroubled by complex systems or massive levels of challenge. And sometimes, that’s all a game needs to be.