Buried
Black Ops 2 Zombies has been an interesting ride. We've had Tranzit (to quote Top Gear, ambitious but rubbish), Die Rise (vertical skyscraper fun), Mob of the Dead (well-made campaign level with Zombies), and now we have Buried, an underground western town in the Horn of Africa. While there is a valid story reason for this, we'll just skim over this twist which certainly wasn't made to stop a fourth icon being added to America in the globe map select menu. So, with the shadow of the amazingly made Mob of the Dead looming over it, can Buried succeed? Buried is back with the New Crew, the well-meaning and surprisingly decent quartet that have starred in Tranzit and Die Rise so far - and while it's nice to see the characters back, they're not exactly memorable, and certainly not as memorable as the Mob of the Dead crew. One of the drawbacks of Mob of the Dead was the replay value - the 'plane quest', in which five parts spawned in fixed locations were required to build a plane which was needed to use the Pack-A-Punch, robbed a great deal of the sandbox value of Zombies, and ended up making it feel a little more like a campaign level - admittedly, I've played Mob of the Dead less than ten times, and the inferior but more replayable Die Rise has racked up close to thirty. Luckily, there's a multitude of choices in what you do and how to play Buried, meaning it feels a little more sandbox and free than Mob of the Dead did. The main feature of Buried is the Big Guy (not Leroy, even though I usually call him Logan for some reason), a ten-foot-tall giant who can be let out of a jail cell and fed booze or candy to break down barriers to new areas. Not only that, but he can switch up power ups, stomp zombies, move the mystery box and generally be a bit of a badass. It's a great, fresh new addition to the game (and he's weirdly cute for a giant), despite the irritating fact that if you shoot him, he runs back to his cell and the key has to be found again. And believe me, he does get in the way
a lot. Still, it's a minor gripe, and the Big Guy is generally an excellent new addition. Other new features include nifty chalk drawings which allow custom placings of wall guns at question mark points (so you can pop your favourite gun at the question mark at your camping spot and hole up there for a while), creepy ghosts that spawn in a mansion and nick 2000 points per hit, a new perk called Vulture Aid which enables the player to see every wall gun and perk in the game and pick up little bags of points and ammo from Zombies, and new Wonder Weapon, the Paralyzer, which er... does what it says on the tin. It's a decent if unspectacular gun that's handy in tight spots, and also enables the player to fly for certain amounts of time. It's probably worth it for that. The map design of Buried is perfectly solid if unremarkable - there's the usual Western tropes, with a saloon, a gunsmith, a bank, a few wagons lying around, a church and a courthouse, but there's no real innovation in map design like the verticality in Die Rise. Admittedly, that's not what we're looking for, but it would be nice if there was some proper innovation map-wise. Still, it makes the few nice touches, like the starting area and the hell-slide and the hedge maze a bit more interesting, and it's still quirky and interesting enough to keep the player interested... but it's not the fantastic. In conclusion, Buried might not be the greatest Zombies map ever, and it's not quite as polished and well-told as Mob of the Dead was. But what Buried is is a great big dollop of sandbox, free-form zombie killing fun, and possibly the most enjoyable Zombies map of Black Ops 2 yet.
Click 'Next' for a review of the new Zombies Ray Gun Mark II and my overall verdict.