Jack Sparks The Ultamite Zombie Rampage

In case you are wondering why game development studios like Valve have hundreds of employees working around the clock for several years in order to make titles like Half-Life or Left 4 Dead, the answer is quite simple: game development is hard. In fact, even legendary studios like Bethesda have a difficult time releasing bug-free games, because programming is never as straightforward as tutorials on YouTube would have you believe.

Jack Sparks The Ultamite Zombie Rampage may not win any grammar awards any time soon, but then again, it’s not a game about differential equations or a study into the intricacies of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. This is a game with guns and zombies in which you have to use the guns to shoot the zombies; it’s that simple. As such, it needs to be judged based on those facts alone, preferably while pretending that it was released thirty years ago by a visionary way ahead of his time.

In essence, the game is a first-person shooter in which you play the role of a manly man by the name of Jack Sparks, who looks remarkably like the main character from another game, but it’s totally not him. He is a SWAT agent sent to deal with the Army of the Living Dead on his own, using a simple pistol no less, while zombies and undead soldiers with rifles patiently wait for him to enter the room before attacking.

The zombies may fool you into underestimating their intellect, but they have quite a few tricks up their sleeve to take you by surprise. Hence, not only can they use the environment to their advantage to get stuck around corners where you cannot see them, but they also seem to be aware of the game’s internal code, because they sometimes just smile at you from outside the range of your pistol and won’t even bother to make a move until you pass a certain threshold. That alone should send shivers down your spine.

Visually, the game is rendered using a three-dimensional engine, one that even allows you to side-step. You cannot make use of your mouse to look around, but that only makes that atmosphere that much more immersive, coupled with the spotless sprites that cleverly pose as the enemies. On top of all this, eerie sound effects burst out of the speakers whenever you fire a gun, in case the animation alone was not already enough to convince you.

In truth, Jack Sparks The Ultamite Zombie Rampage is just someone’s tutorial project on how to get into video game development, which means that it's certainly not something other people would willingly play. Hence, maybe this shouldn’t have left the creator’s hard drive, at least not in this condition.