Last night was the final mission of HvZ for the term, and probably the most terrified I've ever been to walk around campus (which is kinda lame since I was the zombie). So, which side won? Did I even get a single kill? Did I really have nothing better to be doing on a Friday night? Read on, and all the answers will become clear. Except for that last one, which I'm too ashamed to answer.
The final mission boiled down to a game of King of the Hill — no puzzles or clever clues involved in this one, just a game of strategy and skill between the two sides. Both teams needed to secure generators — the humans so that they could sabotage ZombCorp, and the zombies to ensure ZombCorp's survival . In order to do that, a team would have to have undisputed control of the area near moderators (who were spread out across the campus) for 16 minutes. Why 16? Because that's just enough time for a zombie to respawn after being stunned, making it all the more challenging for the surviving humans.
Adding to that, humans who didn't have enough points were also converted to zombies just before the beginning of the final mission (which meant I was once again reunited with my amateur-ish partner). After looking over the instructions and trying to make a guess at where most of the zombies would gather, we headed out to stop the humans from reaching their final objective…
… And got lost for the better part of an hour. In my defence, the zombies were pretty unco-ordinated (which makes sense considering we're supposed to be brainwashed puppets). At one point, I was on my way over to EV3, when I ran into a group of zombies heading over to E3. I followed them all the way to EIT before the leader looked down at his phone and realized he meant to go to EV3 all along. Awesome.
Once we got back to EV3, it occurred to me that whoever was organizing a “kill squad” at the building might have gone a bit overboard with recruiting. There were dozens of zombies across the building, with only two possible entrances into it. There was no way a squad of humans was going to be able to penetrate it and reach the generator, right? Resigning myself to a night of trudging back and forth, I made my way over to E3 again just in time to get slaughtered.
A human squad was breaching Engineering 3 as soon as my tiny zombie party and I showed up. Rendez-vousing with the other zombies in the area, our numbers were probably greater, but there's something to be said for a dozen nerf guns firing at zombies that are all sprinting from one direction. We got wiped out, and the humans seized the locations with very few casualties.
With just a few minutes left until my posse of zombies became un-stunned, buzz came that a final stand was going down in EV3. Waiting until the humans cleared out a bit, I lagged a little behind all the other zombies, taking in the last few moments of the game alongside some zombie that had “Thriller” playing from his phone. As it turns out, taking the scenic route was the right call, because when we got to EV3, the humans had miraculously taken out the dozens of zombies that had amassed there. We snuck up behind some humans guarding the exit and tagged them before they could fight back. I even managed to tag a poor bastard whose gun jammed right as I reached out to him. Now, with only a glass door separating myself and four other zombies from the remaining humans — about six in total — we waited. There would be only a few minutes until the zombies respawned, and then we would launch our assault.
The last few minutes were tense. Realizing we had the advantage, the zombies started playing with our food. The zombies inside, waiting to revive, taunted the humans with their imminent deaths. From the doorway, my squad would jerk the door open suddenly, just to keep the humans on their toes. About five minutes passed in this way. And then, with one communal scream of “WELCOME TO THE HORDE”, the entirety of the zombie army descended upon the remaining humans.
It'd make for a more interesting story if this became some sort of epic last stand, but let's be honest. There were six survivors and at least 50 zombies coming down on them. They were dead within seconds.
With that, all that was left was capturing the last moderator in the building. With the game over for all intents and purposes, the room changed from a tense battlefield to a social event. Players chatted with other players, picked up discarded nerf darts, and welcomed the newest zombies into the fold. We all counted down the last few seconds before the last moderator was captured.
Five…
Four…
Three…
Two…
One…
Zombies win.
And so ended my first experience with Humans versus Zombies. It was a hell of a time — even if the premise might seem a bit silly, it gets really intense as soon as you commit yourself to either surviving or infecting the other team. While I think I might be partial to the tension and mild dread that comes from playing as a human, I also had a lot of fun working in the zombie community to overcome the last remnants of humanity.
Thank you to everyone who followed the blog this week, and I hope you've all enjoyed the daily entries.
If you didn't like it though, well, you know…
Bite me.
