The game's menu greets you with ill-suited blaring rock music that doesn't fit the tone of the game that follows. (When you're trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, your first step is probably not to turn on a soaring guitar solo to draw attention to yourself and your roving gang of gunmen.) The single-player campaign is a quick six-mission distraction to introduce you to the core multiplayer action, with only two missions actually reflecting that core experience. The game opens up with you defending your buddy's escape plan (his car) from a meager offering of slow-moving, mostly nonthreatening undead.
Once the car starts, you must drive away on a long street littered with zombies just waiting for you to plow them over. The mission is failable, but only if you come to a complete stop. And though the road is winding, you can drive straight until the very end for one final turn in order to beat the stage. Once you come to the end of the street, the game introduces you to a caricature hillbilly who tinkers in scrap metal (the game's resource) in order to turn it into more usable forms, like a gun turret or a strange bug zapper that stuns the encroaching zombie horde. Wyatt, the aforementioned redneck, isn't a humorous portrayal at all; he's simply an overacted representation of Southern stereotypes. This character is grating, and he's present throughout the multiplayer game.
Not even the flashlight can help you see a reason to keep playing this game.
The campaign attempts to get to survival shooter roots with a trip through the zombie-infested sewers, but because the zombies are uniformly spaced apart, there's almost no tension in the journey. The sewers play more like an attempt at capturing the gameplay of an action role-playing game like Diablo or Torchlight (minus any exciting character skills) than a shooter, and the randomized weapon drops further push the game in that direction. You don't find weapons in preset locations; they drop randomly from the zombies. Their temporary boost in power is great, except that the amazing power of the rocket launcher and railgun is wasted in a sewer with no more than two to three zombies approaching you at a time. There's no epic carnage or cathartic mega-corpse explosion extravaganza.
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