This wants to be Zombieland meets Don’t Starve but the humor and survival gameplay are both too dull

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SHOULD I PLAY WELCOME TO PARADIZE?

You can safely skip this one, unless you really can’t get enough basic survival crafting action. That’s all the gameplay you’re going to find in Welcome to ParadiZe, although it’s wrapped in a charmingly corny comedy wrapper that helps smooth over all the parts that don’t make sense. On a technical level it works just fine and it does what it sets out to do, but this is a mechanically unambitious game that’s not interesting to play.

TIME PLAYED

I played just over an hour and a half of Welcome to ParadiZe, which was how long it took me to complete the free demo on Steam that’s currently available as part of the latest Steam Next Fest. After entering the devastated and (mostly) abandoned safe haven of ParadiZe, I collected twigs and leaves, recruited my own zombie minion, killed a bunch of “wild” zombies out in the forest, and built a rudimentary base with a shelter, power generator, and weapons shop. After that, I had to find a couple pieces of “alloy metal” so I could build a rocket launch pad in the hopes of making contact with the survivors of the settlement, who had all left for the relative safety of the moon.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT WELCOME TO PARADIZE?

• Nice visuals. Welcome to ParadiZe isn’t pushing any graphical boundaries or anything, but it does look nice. I enjoyed the sunbeams that poked through the trees as I explored the wild forest area outside the destroyed settlement, and the moat that surrounded the town—full of bodies and ornery zombies—was spectacularly filthy and gory. Great stuff. I also liked the wacky zombie animations: The ones the former residents had “tamed” with electrical helmets stood around twitching a bit as their malfunctioning headgear shorted out, and the feral zombies lurched around with their arms helicoptering wildly. The game has a neat look to it.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN WELCOME TO PARADIZE?

• The humor doesn’t really land. I get that Welcome to ParadiZe is meant to be a goofy game, but it really didn’t work for me—at least, not beyond lowering my expectations for everything else. I was hopeful when I first launched the game; there’s an introductory cinematic that almost looks like something Tim & Eric might have made, but the weird ’90s VHS vibe doesn’t last beyond that, regrettably.

• Combat is dull. I ran into several types of zombies in Welcome to ParadiZe: standard lurchers, some that carried Airsoft-style guns, zombies with propellers on their backs that could charge me and knock me down, and some with long spikes driven through them that damaged me if I got too close. None of this had much impact on my tactics, though. I picked so much scrap up off the ground that I was never short on ammo, so I would try to find a bottleneck somewhere and have the zombies file through it while I fired away at them.

• Dated, generic, and boring. I would have described Welcome to ParadiZe as feeling worn-out if I had played it in 2019. There was just nothing new or interesting about it. It had me collecting the same resources, wandering around in the same forest, building the same structures that have been genre staples for ages now. Even if the humor had been more effective, I don’t think that would have been enough to overcome the tired game mechanics on offer here. Really, all it managed to do is make me wish I was playing Project Zomboid instead.

PLATFORM TESTED

PC via Steam.