Recent reviews by ImSpartacus

Gameplay is similar to other systemic games like Bioshock, Fallout, etc. Story is a little weaker than a game like Bioshock, but still engrossing.

The DLC, Mooncrash, is an absolute must-play. It is possibly the best systemic gameplay that I've ever experienced.

I've put more than sixty hours into this game and Contagion's gameplay design is fundamentally broken. I want it to be good, but it's not. This breaks my heart because I know that a team spent many many manhours trying to make this into a cool game. I really wish it was a proper successor to ZPS.

Coming from around a thousand hours in ZPS, I was attracted to Contagion's "Escape" mode and I played this mode the most. There are other modes, but they are generally bland copycat "afterthoughts" that are done better in other games. Escape is the only mode that enticed me to get Contagion.

However, Escape has numerous fundamental game design flaws that permanently gimp its gameplay. To illustrate, it's best to walk through a typical Escape game:

• "Escape" generally begins as a co-op mode with up to around 8 teammates. Initially, you're playing against only NPC zombies. However, the NPC zombies are completely boring to fight against. You either have boring citizen zombies that die to a single headshot or you have uninspiring bullet-sponge riot-armor zombies. I couldn't find any engaging strategy to defeat these bullet-sponges except repeated shots to the noggin. Therefore, the NPC zombies are more of a chore to fight through.
  
  
• Even though players soon find that the NPC zombies don't post much threat, the level design, itself, will kill them (either literally or figuratively):
  
  
  
  • There are simple "no no" level design decisions like the the frequent use of ladders. Since Contagion is built on Source, ladders are horrific and will literally get players killed without any zombie involvement (Even Valve wisely prefers to not use ladders in Source). When I completed Camp Whitner for the first time, I was led through by an experienced player (see showstoppingly confusing level design below) and he literally stops at one point to say, "Watch out, this ladder will kill you." I knew how Source ladders worked and carefully navigated down the shaft. My other inexperienced teammate did not and was instakilled by fall damage. The experienced player obviously knew about the trouble from that stupidly unnecessary ladder. I'm not sure how the developers could have so much experience with Source dating back to ZPS in 2007 and still not know that ladders are terrible level design.
    
    
  • There are also situations where the macro-scale level design pathing is so bad on certain maps that new players will just quit out of frustration. Maps like Barlow Square on Escape prematurely appear like easy-to-navigate "sandbox" urban "city" maps (awesome! right?). So at first you might go, "oh cool, that gun shop is a couple blocks west of our position. Let's make our way in that direction!" However, you have ZERO navigational liberty and you are FORCED onto a 100% LINEAR path due to miles of chainlink fence that procedurally block every path except ONE. This might only be "bad", but it moves to "terrible" when you find out that the dynamic path is often obscurred and basically hidden. If you are a new player that isn't aware that there's exactly one path to move through the map, then you will quickly get confused, then frustrated, then you'll quit. This happens on a painfully regular basis. The zombies don't end their fun - it's the map's level design that does that.
    
    
  • Furthermore, there are micro-scale level design issues. The latest example is one that I just experienced this morning.
    I was trying to beat Montclair with some equally inexperienced players and we got to a military medical base in a park. After easily clearing it of boring NPC zombies, we walked past a locked gate and we were told to go find the key in the park. We didn't know what this "key" looked like, but we combed the park nevertheless. We came up with nothing, yet we kept looking for what felt like hours. It got so desparate that the player-controlled zombie started trying to help us find it. Eventually my only living partner turned into a zombie as a result of a random bite and I just quit to end that pitiful match. This is one example of how needlessly frustrating this game is. Stuff like this is simply unfun.
  
  
• But if you manage to get through all of those inherent level design flaws, then you'll notice that player-controlled zombies are frighteningly unbalanced. It gets so bad, that some experienced players intentionally die at the beginning of the match just so they can single-handedly destroy their former teammates before they can even get through the first couple objectives. How in the world can it be so unbalanced?
  
  
  • It's almost impossible to hit a player zombie as compared to an identical NPC zombie. I've heard players claim that player zombies have unique hitboxes. My hunch is that the game has poor networking and it's normally masked by allowing NPC zombie hits to be credited only clientside (versus player zombie hits that must be validated serverside). Either way, this is a very very very noticeable phenomena and it makes player zombies very difficult to deal with.
    
    
  • Oh and player zombies can "dodge" as well. The experienced ones know that if their head stays unscathed, then they can tear through a group of players, so they spin, duck, jump and do all sorts of stupid moves to turn themselves into a walking killing machine. That's not fun. This is not a featured capability. There's no tooltips or tutorials that explain all of the intricacies of this maneuvering. That tells me that it isn't a designed feature. And since it ruins entire Escape servers, I say it's an exploit that is unpatched two years after release.

I really drive home hard enough that this is a frustrating game to play. If I hadn't dropped a thousand hours in ZPS, I would've abandoned it long ago. This game does not play like ZPS. It's something much much worse and that breaks my heart.

If you've ever wanted to say, "Full power to shields!" like a spaceship captain from a classic sci fi flick, then this is your game.

Best chat room simulator on Steam, would recommend.