Undead & Beyond is an unusual kind of hybrid of soldier defense/attack combined with 2D top down brawler and action/adventure game elements... which sounds complicated but it's really a good idea for a game, implemented terribly. The idea is that you're a mad scientist and your bosses are trying to kill you, so you need to escape the lab bunker complex thing. But you're a wimpy, if deranged scientist, so how to go about this? Zombies, of course. Conveniently, your minions don't try to kill you, so you can go ahead and make as many zombies as possible. While the zombies are murdering all the guards and other scientists, you can go about your other jobs like collecting briefcases and working out how to escape.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.
This is a good and fun idea for a game, and it's delightful to watch your minions running around, and those so-called colleagues getting their comeuppance, but the game looks like it's 30 years old... the implementation is amateur hour here and it's just not worth the money for a game with such poor visuals and delivery. There are some complaints around game balance and difficulty, but really, this game doesn't even get off the starting block due to the poor technicals.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The controls can't be customised (and they are pretty awkward), which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 7 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Undead & Beyond has the laughable price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 2", "Assetto Corsa" or "Batman: Arkham Origins". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
