Stubbs the Zombie

Thanks to the success of titles like Resident Evil and Hollywood's general zombie fixation, dozens of games have been produced that let players take on the role of a human as he or she cuts though swathes of shuffling undead creatures. Well, now it's time to tell the other side of the story.

Stubbs the Zombie has an unashamedly silly premise. You play a semi-decomposed, re-animated corpse let loose in a city with one single-minded aim; to eat as many human brains as possible and thus propagate yourself into a swelling zombie horde.

Plot-wise, that's all you need to know. Stubbs pops out of the ground at the beginning of the game - why, we're never told - and the rest of the game sees him gallivanting round Punchbowl, the game's space-age, 1950s-style American setting, wreaking havoc as he goes.

As a zombie, there are several ways to dispatch your victims. You can simply grab them and tuck into their brains there and then.

Alternatively, you can use a number of repellent 'weapons' such as a deadly form of flatulence or a kind of grenade that involves dipping into your own innards and hurling a putrid organ at your foes.

When the joke starts to wear thin you can always tear off an arm and send it creeping over to a human, whereupon you can possess your victim and control him, making him shoot all his human counterparts with a range of more traditional firearms.

If this all sounds puerile in the extreme, that's because it is. But the schoolboy humour and relentlessly daft gameplay are not without their charms.

Played in small doses, Stubbs is actually a fairly satisfying third-person action game. It's based on the Halo engine, although graphically speaking it's solid rather than spectacular.

On the other hand, the game's dialogue and music are both very sharp.

System requirements:
1.2GHz processor
256MB of Ram
4GB free hard disk space
64MB video card
Windows 2000/XP