Far Cry 5: Dead Living Zombies DLC Review

The latest and final DLC for Far Cry 5 has arrived, and it’s actually the first one that should have come out. For whatever reason, they swapped Dead Living Zombies to be the third one, and honestly I’m having trouble thinking of why they would do such a thing.

The framing device, sorry, story for Dead Living Zombies is that Guy, the movie director you can meet in Hope County, is trying to pitch a zombie movie. Well, he’s trying to pitch seven of them to people across Hollywood. This means there are seven different scenarios that you get to play the protagonist in, starting with a farmer fending off the hordes, and getting crazier from there.

Yes, that says "Kill the Blood Dragon"

I’ll admit, the pitches themselves are fantastic - I’d watch some of those movies. The levels, however, not so much. The main fault lies in the fact that there are no checkpoints in any of the levels. Of course, that’s not so much of a problem for the one level which you can literally finish in under five minutes, but if you’re looking to spend up to two hours on this DLC it can be tiring. There’s more content than just two hours, but if you just want to play all of the levels once, then you’re getting no more than two.

For instance, you can do score attacks on each level, trying to get to the top of the leaderboards. There’s also the option to play through them all in co-op, though I didn’t get the opportunity to try it, since nobody else I knew bought the season pass.

Each of the seven levels are a different genre, and there were three that I truly enjoyed playing through. One was a race against the clock, another was a love story, and the final was infiltrating a secret lab, where I inadvertently bypassed most of the level. You start on a jetski and can get on and off on your way to the lab - I didn’t, and missed loads of stuff.

Unlike in the romantic horror pitch

Another thing I didn’t like were the zombies. Yes, I’m not a fan of them in games, but that’s not what I’m talking about. They’re created by yellow goo, which makes them glow yellow - great design, some of them look really good - but they’re not zombies. Most levels have these “mutation stations” which generate a bunch of zombies every 20 seconds or so - just forming them out of the ground. One - those things are badly named since they don’t mutate anything. Two - most of the zombies you kill won’t have been anywhere near one of these things to be created!

This being an action game, of course they’re the speedy zombies that climb over things. The second level, although one of my least favourite, has a fantastic set piece that shows what the zombies can do. Unfortunately, most of it is just killing waves of zombies, then running somewhere else to kill more - rinse and repeat. The levels are varied and there’s a lot of interesting ideas, but I really didn’t enjoy my time with this.

It’s unfortunate that Ubisoft decided to end with something so weak. The first two DLC were fantastic fun, but Dead Living Zombies fails to be innovative, with a very light coating on top of a glorified Zombie Mode. I honestly don’t know how they could have made this better, but I’m sure it was possible. A lackluster end to the season pass trilogy, and to my time with Far Cry 5.