PS5 Review: Welcome to ParadiZe

Is this game ParadiZe on Earth?

Ever wanted a zombie to help out at home? What’s better than a shuffling undead that defends you, builds your barricades, and one you can leave to fend off their ravenous peers when you need to make a quick getaway Alone or in multiplayer, try to survive the apocalypse in the open world of Paradize! Paradize Project proposes survival, combat, multiplayer, all set in an open world in an entirely new take on the zombie genre. You have to be the smartest and the most skilled to dominate the enemy clans and avoid getting devoured. Especially by Miss Daisy, the first-ever zombified elephant recorded in the zombie history books!

Welcome to ParadiZe is an isometric-type game with zombies that you can gather into your own army to do your bidding. It begins with you entering the so-called safe haven of ParadiZe where zombies can actually help people with their daily lives and protect them from the others that haven’t been converted by the tech. You essentially capture them by wilting down their health and shoving a helmet on them that puts them under your control.

The problem with this is you can accidentally kill them in trying to do so and in tough skirmishes, it can be chaotic in trying to even try and attach them. If you are successful though, you can use them to fight for you in combat or build defences and gather resources and so on. Combat itself feels clunky and the stamina bar seems to deplete far too quickly, weapons break very easily and the overall controls feel a bit rigid.

You can set each individual zombie to multiple tasks both in and out of combat, which is a simple enough process. You can also play the game with another player via co-op, which definitely helps.

It’s a neat idea and when it works, it works well. The game does have a few bugs and framerate hiccups, some of which have been patched but some still remain. The visuals are average but the music and voice-acting are decent.

The Verdict

Welcome to ParadiZe has good ideas, but is let down by clunky combat, rigid controls and technical issues. It’s a shame as I had quite high hopes for it going in, but the truth is that it just doesn’t deliver well enough in the end.

Score: 6.0