I remember when I first graduated from high school, I was trying to figure out if I wanted video games to still be a big part of my life. That year was 2010, and so Red Dead Redemption ended up answering that question with a resounding yes. And while I had played other games before Red Dead, something I wasn’t as familiar with yet was downloadable content. So, when I got around to the utter joy of Undead Nightmare, I found one of my favorite games suddenly got a whole heck of a lot better!
In the decade-plus since, we’ve seen a sequel to that game that has an even better story, but a complete forgoing of single-player DLC. I replayed RDR not long after RDR 2 was out, and still loved it, but when it came to trying out Undead Nightmare again, I found that part of the game was better tucked away in my memories.
Would you believe the very first thing Undead Nightmare made me do was also the most contentious thing it asked of me? When only RDR 1 was in my mind’s eye, Uncle was little more than a comedy character who hissed and snarled, and I was a stupid young adult who didn’t look into him enough to care that Undead Nightmare makes you shoot him in the head. The DLC needs to teach you the mechanics of killing the zombies, and it chose Uncle as the sacrificial lamb instead of some generic NPC.
And that’s nothing more than a cruel joke on the fact that players didn’t like Uncle all that much. I’m not even kidding; that’s clearly the intent, as other player-hated characters Professor MacDougal and Herbert Moon also get zombified in moments meant as comedy. And Uncle’s is just as played-for-laughs; Marston practically spits on Uncle’s corpse afterward with how proudly angry he sounds after killing him, and when the plague is reversed at the end, the Marston family can’t even be bothered to remember Uncle ever existed.
It’s just not funny. Both as someone who’s played RDR 2, which showed Uncle and John had a true friendship, and as someone mature enough to remember even the original game had a wonderful moment in which grouchy and lazy Uncle gives his life to protect the found family he loves. This was just a bad joke catering to the children who didn’t like grumpy old Uncle, and it shows. Most of the jokes are this cynically juvenile, unfortunately.
Everyone’s just unnecessarily flippant and cruel in this DLC. Marshall barely cares that his deputies are dead, Landon Ricketts just brushes the apocalypse off like it’s no big deal, and then there’s Nigel West Dickens fully crossing a line by pretending to invent a zombie repellent for profit—a joke that’s even dumber considering the voice actor has to say it costs 100 gold coins with a straight face in a game where dollars are the currency.
This DLC succeeds with moments like finally getting to blow Reyes to smithereens, but then you also wonder where the hell Irish ran off to, since getting murdered as a joke sounds like the best contribution he ever could have given. It’s just juvenile in a way that doesn’t even feel like dark comedy, but more like frat boy humor where something shocking happens and that’s supposed to be the whole joke. And Rockstar’s usually pretty good at that, as I do laugh at the jokes in GTA V!
Undead Nightmare just doesn’t have a good grasp on how to be funny. It’s more interested in being in-your-face, without knowing how to make that funny.
Gameplay on the other hand? There’s a lot to still enjoy there! There are two new horde-mode style mechanics, and I heavily enjoy both of them. With the cemeteries, John has to go in and personally put those Undead back in the ground. To do this, you are given a torch and have to burn all the coffins, and after you’ve done that, killing enough zombies will awaken their leader. This leader will usually be a character from the main game, but the choices are mostly weak for whatever reason.
You end up killing characters you met from Stranger Missions and a few completely new people, but then you suddenly get Captain De Santa thrown to you at the end. I think the idea was to make him a surprise twist—suddenly a past villain gets to return—but frankly, it really would have been better if all the lead zombies were returning enemies. Bill, Javier, Dutch, Allende, Norman, Espinoza—hell, let me put another bullet in Muller. I’m still mad he accused me of looking at his cards.
What’s even better than the combat is the setting, filled with overrun towns. These always feel stressful in the right way, and the options for how you can tackle them are great.
The town has a bar you fill by killing zombies, and once it’s full, a dot above the bar gets filled in too. Once all the dots are filled, you’re saved the town. However, you can instantly fill a dot if you give spare ammo to a survivor, who will only take specific ammo based on their in-use weapon. Ammo is scarce at the start of Undead Nightmare, so I love this tradeoff, as it makes you have to consider which option is the best in the middle of the moment.
True, you’ll eventually get more ammo than you’ll ever need, and that Torch is overpowered as a melee weapon, but I still like this town mechanic to the point I’m happy it’s in the postgame, because it’s really the only thing to do after the credits roll. It’s not exactly as fun as the online multiplayer, but that will shutter one day and isn’t even included in the PS4/Switch port, so at least Undead Nightmare’s overrun towns are here to stay.
And then, of course, there are the other supernatural creatures of Undead Nightmare. The genocide of the Bigfoot still feels painful, and on the opposite side of that coin, collecting the four horses of the apocalypse is always a treat. You’ll need to do both if you want to ride a Unicorn at 100% completion!
However, you also have to kill the Bigfoot to finish the story, which to me, is a negative. See, I always thought that was an optional side mission, but in my most recent replay I discovered that, no, there are no optional side missions. Every mission is a story mission. There’s no freedom of choice here and no chance at doing a mission as Zombie Marston, which just feels like wasted potential.
When I think great DLC, I think of, say, the 23rd World Tournament in Kakarot. I think of Pokemon’s latest attempts, such as giving me a new character I didn’t expect to love. But I no longer think of Undead Nightmare. It’s more fun than say the lackluster missions added in Just Cause 3, but it misses as many shots as it hits. It’s never a waste to play, but there are far better things to do with your time, even during Halloween.
