Urban Dead

“Urban Dead is a low-tech zombie apocalypse browser game where thousands of survivors and zombies battle for the control of a quarantined city.”

So reads the front page of what, out of necessity, has become my favorite online diversion in recent months. It’s rather fitting that the only game my shambling wreck of a computer can run these days is one in which humans stalwartly slog it out with semi-functional corpses. If anyone is here looking for a game on par with Resident Evil, Dead Rising, or even Zombies Ate My Neighbors in terms of graphics and storyline then you’ll be sorely disappointed with Urban Dead. If, however, you’re looking for an intriguing text/browser-based zombie MMO which also happens to be free…then you’ve come to the right place.

As I’ve alluded to already there are no real graphics and there is virtually no story in Urban Dead. What you do have is an intelligent game based on the time-honored horror movie premise of zombies taking over a city and the human survivors fighting for their lives. The game is set in the city of Malton which is divided up into a 10 x 10 square grid of suburbs. Each suburb is further divided into a 10 x 10 square grid of streets, buildings, cemeteries, parks, monuments and so on. These 10,000 squares give players a pretty big sandbox to play around in and as far as I can tell a freshly created character might begin the game in any of the one hundred suburbs that make up Malton.

Creating a character is quick and easy as you simply select a class, provide a name and password and begin the game. There are nine classes from four different categories to choose from all with distinct advantages and disadvantages. The Military classes are the Private (your basic grunt who is competent with a gun), the Medic (a healer armed with a pistol) and the Scout (the most effective class at evading zombie threats). The Scientist classes are the NecroTech Lab Assistant (who deal directly in identifying zombies and in turning them back into human survivors) and the Doctor (who begin the game with the ability to see the hit points of all fellow survivors). The Civilian classes are the Police Officer (similar to the Private), the Firefighter (specializing in the fire axe), and the Consumer (John Q. Public armed with a random improvised weapon and a mobile phone). The remaining category is Zombie and there’s only one class – the Corpse (any of the above classes can become a zombie if infected or killed by another zombie, but the Corpse starts out stronger than survivors who are later turned into zombies).

The four categories of classes directly relate to the four types of skills available to characters in the game: Military, Science, Miscellaneous (or Civilian) and Zombie skills. Civilian characters pay the same amount of experience points (100 XP) for all four types of skills. Military characters are predisposed to learning Military skills and can thus purchase them with fewer experience points (75 XP). However, as it’s further from their area of expertise, Military characters must spend far more on Science skills (150 XP) than other characters. The exact opposite is true for Scientist characters. I have yet to play the game from the point of view of a career Zombie, so I can’t say exactly how it works for the Corpse class.

Military skills are based almost exclusively on the use of firearms. If you want to gun down zombies with a pistol or shotgun (the only firearms available in the game unless you count the one-shot flare gun), then you’ll want to focus on Military skills. Perhaps the most universally useful Military skill, however, is called Free Running. It allows survivors to move from building to building throughout Malton without having to travel through the zombie-infested streets. Free Running is extremely useful for staying alive in Urban Dead as survivors often over-barricade buildings making many of them inaccessible from outside.

Scientific skills are of basically two types: 1) those related to NecroTech Labs and 2) those related to mundane healing. The NecroTech skills allow you to create and use devices such as DNA Extractors (used to test a zombie to see what abilities they possess and who they were before becoming zombies) and Revivication Syringes (which allow you to turn a zombie back into a survivor). The healing skills are just that, they allow you to either heal more points with first-aid kits or to diagnose survivors.

Miscellaneous or Civilian skills are simply skills that don’t fall into either of the above categories. It includes everything from Construction (allowing you to barricade buildings and repair equipment) to Body Building (providing you with a bonus of +10 hit points). There are quite a few of these skills and they’re far more varied than either Military or Scientific skills.

Zombie skills are exactly what they sound like: skills which improve the Corpse class by leaps and bounds. While I haven’t played a zombie myself some examples include Lurching Gait (zombies move as fast as survivors), Memories of Life (zombies can open doors to buildings) and Scent Fear (zombies can track badly wounded humans). Each of these allows access to greater powers later on. For instance, Scent Fear leads eventually to Scent Trail, allowing a zombie to track any survivor who has recently occupied the same square in which the zombie is located.

That’s pretty much it for skills. All characters start the game with 50 hit points and some equipment related to their chosen class. This equipment could be anything from a pistol to a pool cue or from binoculars to a first-aid kit. First-aid kits are the best way of healing either yourself or fellow survivors, but bottles of wine or beer will heal minor wounds in a pinch. Long-distance survivor-to-survivor communications require that both characters have a Mobile Phone and that they are on each other’s Contacts List. Properly tuned Radios will allow you to listen to anyone broadcasting from a specific station with a working Transmitter, as well. There’s an assortment of other items, both useful (reading books is a slow, but safe way for characters to gain experience) and cosmetic (newspapers, poetry books and crucifixes are attainable, but they serve no practical purpose).

The goal of Urban Dead is simply to stay alive or, if you happen to be undead, to convince survivors to join your ranks by gnawing on/killing them. The usual set up is that survivors barricade themselves inside buildings and zombies try to infiltrate those buildings and attack survivors, but sometimes you’ll see this scenario turned on its head. I once saw a military fort filled with survivors get overrun by zombies and just two days later the entire fenced-in nine square city block was populated with the living dead. Of course, sometimes the best defense is a good offense, so you’ll often see survivors venture out into the streets to try and take down some zombies and earn some sweet XP. This is fine as long as you remember to give yourself time to back to safety before you run out of Action Points.

Everyone starts out with 50 Action Points which regenerate at a rate of 1 point every half hour. These points, as their name so aptly states, allow a character to perform 50 actions per day* before becoming exhausted. Everything your character does from searching an area to moving from one street to another to firing a weapon uses up one Action Point. If you happen to run out of Action Points your character immediately goes to sleep. If this occurs while your character is outdoors the next time you log in you will likely find yourself zombie chow…and thus a zombie yourself. If this happens you can either decide to make a career of eating people or you can find your way to a revivification point ASAP. Revivication points are various places in each suburb (often a cemetery or an area near a NecroTech Lab) where NecroTech scientists have established a safe zone for zombies looking to return to their former lives. Of course, there’s nothing stopping a survivor who doesn’t know better from blowing your undead brains out even if you’re standing in a dedicated revivication point. For that matter there’s nothing to stop survivors from blowing each other’s brains out either…

Player Killing (PKing) is prevalent in most MMOs so it should be no surprise to find it in Urban Dead. In fact, there are entire groups dedicated to PKing. Groups are basically organizations of like-minded players working towards a common goal. The most common type of group is a Pro-Survivor group, but there are also Pro-Zombie groups composed of deadites and even some groups composed of mortals who were once Zombies and seek to aid their undead brethren by working against the survivors. You can find groups that are extremely militant, groups that focus solely on healing, groups of axe-wielding Firefighters…pretty much anything you can think of.

A lot of the joy of playing Urban Dead is lost on those who only give it a cursory glance. If I had a computer that could run anything other than solitaire or owned a console, I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to get beneath the surface of this game. If you really want to learn how to play the game you’ll pretty much have to familiarize yourself with The Urban Dead Wiki. It’s invaluable to the player who doesn’t want to stumble around blindly and wake up dead or lost every time he/she logs in.

Beginners should also probably choose a class based on what they most want to accomplish early on in the game. Privates are the best choice for a character who wants to focus on firearms. Scouts are great for traveling long distances right off the bat because of their Free Running skill. Firefighters make the best melee combatants as they’re already trained and equipped with the fire axe. If you don’t mind staying close to one area and avoiding combat, the Doctor is easily the best choice as they can gain XP by healing other survivors. Either way you go the first skill you’re going to want to procure is probably Free Running. It’s the safest way to travel and the easiest way to get access to heavily barricaded buildings.

Survivors tend to keep most buildings EHB (Extremely Heavily Barricaded) which means they’re virtually inaccessible from outside unless you have a Crowbar and want to spend all your action points tearing down walls so you can get inside. Only buildings VSB (Very Strongly Barricaded) or less are accessible from the street and these usually serve as Entry Points for survivors while the EHB buildings basically act as walls to keep out zombies. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for an incautious survivor to end up trapped out on the streets. Again, referring to The Urban Dead Wiki is probably the wisest choice as you can locate Entry Points before your character starts wandering around aimlessly.

Urban Dead isn’t the kind of game you can just run into blindly and start hacking and slashing. It’s more or less like an elaborate chess game set on a gigantic board with the ability to customize your playing pieces. While it is an MMO, the game has no set system for creating and maintaining parties, so even if you do play with a friend you won’t be able to share XP or trade items. In fact, all you can really do with an ally is communicate, attack walking corpses that are in the same area and heal one another. When it comes down to brass tacks, however, you’re basically on your own in Urban Dead. Just like in any good zombie movie.

*A final note or those interested in running multiple characters. I would suggest you read up on the Hit Limit and how you can exempt a character from said limit by making a one-time donation in support of this excellent game.