Aww, but I wanted UnKarted: Sullivan's Revenge!
I've read several comments about the girl possibly being Ellen Page, and I have to say, I'm fascinated by just how much she moves like her. Animation is something I seriously adore. Whacking a fungie (as they forever shall be known) was also fantastic.
I'm guessing that after 'Naughty Dog' popped up people expected the guy to be Nolan North, right? It was actually somewhat disconcerting when it wasn't for me, given the basic structure, rendering, animation, etc.
This guaranteed is a third-person game, by the way. How do I know? Naughty Dog hasn't made anything else, ever. They have a focus on characters, and that's how they do things. I have no doubt this will be like Uncharted essentially, given the same people and hardware and stuff, and that's really not a bad thing. What they do differently in differentiating the two games will be what really makes it awesome. Because really, "Uncharted with zombies" was, um...Uncharted. Drake's Fortune. But the series has always been and felt like Action/Adventure. That's how it plays. Naughty Dog making Survival? Now that's interesting.
Now, zombies are played out. Everybody knows it. To ignore Hollywood for the moment, however, games that use zombies...are about zombies. (Some fantasy exceptions, but you know what I mean.) They're games all about killing zombies, cut and dried. Everything other than the act and function of shooting the zeds in the head is tangential to the game at the end. Where this has me interested, though, is that so far this seems to be actually about the people, the actual surviving, and the fungies are a visual and mechanical representation of that struggle. After all, Naughty Dog does get story in a way that just about nobody else in the industry does, in that the actual progression-of-events story is the game, rather than the game really being just the setting.
I've got one thing against the fungies, though. When there's giant bulbous plant-stuff growing out of somebody's head, that dehumanizes them, because there's no face. Zombies, whether undead, infected, or other, have always been a reflection of the uncontrollable, animal nature inside man. When you get a fungie that doesn't have a proper face...some of that is simply lost. You go from 'twisted man' which has an emotionally involving aspect, even if they are 'gone', to an 'other' monster, a creature that has the basic form of man, but is essentially different. Like any humanoid enemy you'll find across fantasy and sci fi, they're interesting but empty designs. Also, zombies which come across the same way are simply zombies done badly.
I have a sneaking suspicion. I think this game isn't co-op. I think this game is an escort mission. But the good kind like Ico, the thematically-related-to-this Enslaved, or maybe the latest Prince of Persia, or hopefully Bioshock Infinite, where the game is about you, as a character, going through it with another character, and it being about the interaction of those characters. But, you know, with good AI.
See, while Uncharted is essentially about Nathan Drake, surrounded on and off by various wonderful pals, there's still just enough of a sense in places that Nate is going through things with somebody else, rather than blazing a trail with some AI following behind. If they refine this to perfection like only Naughty Dog can, then the game can be about these two going through everything. And that has be genuinely anticipating this with just a slight, nervous excitement.
