5150 Demo

Fear is experienced by everyone in a different way, which makes it pretty difficult to come up with something that works on every person when it comes to horror flicks. However, you can just go for something that is guaranteed to terrify the majority of the public, such as gruesome-looking mutants, human-eating monsters, or insane asylums inhabited by zombies.

5150 went with the latter and it attempts to inspire fear by making use of creepy long corridors, sinister experiments on humans and the usual straitjacket-wearing zombies. The game is still in its infancy and it certainly needs a lot more work to be complete, especially when it comes to level design, story and the A.I., although none of the other elements are on the right path either.

The developer’s description of the game is basically a placeholder for the story, because you wouldn’t really know what’s going on otherwise. No details are given about the main character at the start of the story, nor about and how did you get in what seems to be an abandoned building. A guard and some kind of medical experiment involving electricity and a skeleton hint to the fact that this might be a hospital of sorts, but other than that, you are pretty much free to believe what you want.

Creepy corridors may be a good way to create a certain kind of atmosphere, but they really need to be holding more than a few wooden boxes in order to accomplish anything. The rooms are barren and lacking in detail as well, which really hurts the overall experience. The graphics do not impress either, although it is pretty difficult to tell without any models to look at.

However, the difficulty level is what might turn you off for good, since the zombies are incredibly hard to kill, given the fact that you only have a knife to use on them. Technically, with a combination of speed, skill and luck, you can put one of them down, but you might find yourself asking if it is worth the effort, especially since it is neither fun nor scary.

While it is true that 5150 is just a side-project and not a triple-A attempt by some professional studio, there are more than enough indie releases out there that fare much better than this. Very little effort went into the level design, the mechanics are weak and the horror element is solely represented by three zombies and a few sound effects.