Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green is a first-person shooter licensed video game based on the George A. Romero zombie horror movie Land of the Dead. Like many licensed games, Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green was made with budget-game production values.
Plot
The game is a prequel to the Land of the Dead film, taking place during the initial outbreak of the zombie epidemic. Players take on the role of a farmer named Jack, who, one day, finds his farm besieged by the undead. After finding the other nearby farms desolate, he makes his way to the city, hoping to find help, but instead finding the city in ruins, overrun by the undead. Jack later learns about the existence of a safe-haven located within the city, and makes it his priority to reach it.
Gameplay
Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green utilizes traditional first-person shooter gameplay. Players can use a variety of either melee weapons or firearms to fight through the zombie hordes. Some weapons are capable of dismembering the zombies, while other weapons are not. The zombies' jaws, heads, arms, forearms, and legs can be shot or chopped off by the player. This can very effectively save the player so as to make an escape. The zombies themselves appear in many varieties (regular, ones armed with a melee weapon, crawlers, puking ones, screamers that summon other zombies, and poisonous, exploding ones) and each takes a different amount of hits to kill, which varies upon the difficulty setting of the game. The player cannot become a zombie, but it is stated that people who die for any reason become zombies, like in the movie.
The multiplayer component of the game consists of many online game types. These consist of deathmatch, team deathmatch, and "Capture the Flag" modes. There is also an "Invasion" (co-op survival) mode, in which players are trapped in a small map where they must survive for a chosen amount of time. In this mode, the weapons and ammunition regenerate in the same spots each time, allowing the players to dodge the burden of ammunition shortages. Players can pick up melee weapons from recently killed melee weapon wielding zombies as well. In some variants of Invasion maps, players who die or are bitten by zombies become zombies themselves, and try to kill their former teammates.
Reception
Critical reviews for the game have been overwhelmingly negative. GameSpot's Alex Navarro, who gave the game a 1.9 (2.1 for the PC version), described it as such:
"There is an almost pseudo-brilliance to the sheer awfulness of Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green. Loosely based within the same universe as zombie pioneer George Romero's Land of the Dead film from earlier this year, Road to Fiddler's Green isn't just content to be another completely unplayable movie-to-game translation. It's almost as though the developers wanted to capture the essence of the zombie through each and every aspect of the game. In many ways, it feels like it was once a regular, workaday, full-featured Xbox game that was horribly murdered by zombies, and then resurrected into a shambled, decrepit, undead version of its former self. Every component of this game is slow to react, dumb as a doornail, and basically broken. It shuffles along at a sluggish, depressing pace while pieces of it literally fall apart at the seams. And the only thing going through its figurative mind is the unquenchable instinct to attack and feed on your free time and money. This is either one of the most avant-garde pieces of gaming artistry to ever find its way to the retail market, or the absolute worst game of the year. Actually, it's probably just the latter."[1]
According to metacritic the average reviewer score is a 32 / 100.[2]