Dead Head Fred - hands-on

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Death Jr., take a hike - this is what a darkly funny horror-adventure should look like

Oddly, not all your heads come from dead enemies. A later level we explored was Zombietown, a suburban neighborhood filled with explorable abandoned houses and (unsurprisingly) ravenous zombies, and it was here that we got to try out the Mannequin Head, which we're told is essential for not freaking people out. When we tried to wear it, however, the freakish-looking, non-zombie citizens of Zombietown reacted pretty much the same as they did when we wore other heads, which is to say they stood around screaming at us. This made us feel especially lame, because we couldn't do anything except wave and stomp the heads of the crawling zombies that grabbed Fred's legs while he was wearing the stupid thing.

Throughout the experience, the camera - which we were promised a year ago would work just fine without a second analog stick - mostly lived up to expectations. It wasn't perfect, but it did a decent job of staying locked behind Fred, and on the few occasions when we needed to look around or move it, there was a simple hold-a-button-while-moving-the-stick workaround. Overall, though, the game felt great; the brawling was fluid, the puzzles were quick and intuitive and Fred himself controlled a lot more smoothly than you'd expect from a dead guy who'd just been fished out of a radioactive swamp.

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.