With Raging Bytes, Kemco RPG developer Hit-Point tried to do something different — craft a survival horror adventure where you control a handful of people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Their success in doing so could charitably be described as a mixed bag, but, hey, they tried!
If you pick up this mobile game, you’ll quickly find out that if Hit-Point truly succeeded in anything, it was cramming in all sorts of references to other entertainment featuring zombies and zombie-adjacent adversaries. By the time you have a full four-person party, you’ll find their names are Ben, Barbra, Harry and Helen — also the names of four characters in Night of the Living Dead. The lead of this quartet, Ben, is first shown waking up in a hospital after being out of it for 28 days (ie: 28 Days Later. Much like Resident Evil 2, you’ll spend a decent chunk of time exploring the police station where one character (Ben) had been employed.
And a large chunk of the game could be considered a truncated version of the original Dawn of the Dead, as your party hits up a shopping mall and clears out a horde of zombies before being forced to leave after a roving band of hooligans smashes through the doors while on a crime spree. I’m sure I could go on, but those are the main references that reached out and struck me over the head.
Basically, after Ben leaves the hospital and realizes the world is far different than it was when he was admitted, he runs into Barbra and the two of them look for anything that may be a safe haven. When he called his police station, the phone was picked up, so that’s their first destination. When that expedition doesn’t work out as hoped, they move on to a new place and then another and another until things just sort of end with your team still searching, but with a renewed sense of hope. It’s a pretty linear game where you go from city streets to buildings and sewers, getting the full “junk food” experience that the average Kemco-released game provides with stunning regularity.
The basic problem is simple. Like so many Kemco games, you have what seems to be a very intriguing system that winds up being easy to exploit, turning the entire game into a mostly suspense-free slog.
For an example, let’s look at combat. Zombies appear on the screen and combat is initiated by either you running into them or vice versa. The combat screen is a first-person perspective where you’ll be attempted to gun them down before they can walk up to you and start chomping. To complicate things, some zombies have projectile attacks and can damage you from a distance. To complicate things more, there is only so much ammo in the game. You’ll find much of it by searching every corpse (even though some of them are zombies who are playing possum), as well as desks, cabinets and every other surface you can interact with; while more can be obtained as rewards for killing the undead.
But the limited ammo never comes into play because the game gives you enough tools to eventually only need to really use the good stuff against bosses. Every character has a special move. For Ben and Harry, that move allows them to deal damage to an enemy. You also obtain a couple ranged weapons that don’t require ammo that you can give to Barbra and Helen, so they also can deliver damage without draining your supply of bullets. While these attacks are weaker than those inflicted by your pistols, revolvers and shotguns, they’re sufficient to quickly bring down the rank-and-file enemies, leading to a situation where I only felt the tension created by limited supplies in the early going. After getting a couple additional party members to back Ben up and finding those “no-ammo” weapons, I quickly amassed a large enough arsenal to tear through bosses without having to worry about conservation.
Also, while Barbra’s special move heals a small amount of damage for one character, your primary source of healing will be the serums you regularly collect throughout the game. And using them is a free action during battle, meaning that you can completely heal everyone in your party without even having to sacrifice a single combat turn to do so.
And when you don’t really have to worry about running out of ammo or keeping everyone’s health topped off in a game like this, you’ve basically taken the “survival” element out of survival horror. And if you’ve accomplished that, there’s not really any horror present, either. You’re just playing a run-of-the-mill role-playing game that just happens to feature zombies and the occasional criminal instead of goblins and the occasional dragon.
I’m not going to completely condemn Raging Bytes. It was a nice change of pace to play a game of this sort that takes place in a modern setting and features horror movie monsters as your primary adversary, and it’s a pretty short game that only took me around 10 hours or so to complete. It just isn’t a particularly good game because it falls into the Kemco Trap where it’s just too easy to devise a strategy that dispels virtually all the challenge it provides. But, still, even if it’s a half-hearted, “It’s short, easy and pretty inexpensive, so if you like zombie stuff, might as well give it a try!” recommendation, it’s still a recommendation, right? RIGHT?!??
