Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse? More like: Stubbs the Zombie in a Game Without a Pulse.

I’m sure that joke has been made a thousand times already.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse has been on my watch list for a long time. I got it in my head that because the game on the original Xbox was rare and valuable and that they remastered it recently then it must be a worthwhile game. I was wrong.

The game starts off relatively simple and you get your kicks from chomping down on civilians and police’s brains. There is a joy in freely running around attacking people but soon enough it starts becoming a bit mundane and boring. The game does get better towards the second half when the gameplay starts to vary but not by much. The game also doesn’t offer that much guidance. No map or objectives just attack people until you find or exit or see green arrows pointing towards an exit.

As well as turning innocent civilians into zombies themselves and having them help you attack the police, you can also use your arm to possess enemies with guns allowing you to run around shooting at people. Other abilities are available too such as farting to stun enemies, rolling your head and throwing your guts like grenades. These are powered up by eating the brains of other humans.There are vehicles available to you in some levels which can be driven around causing more havoc.

The game has a 1950’s retrofuturism look which I was excited by but it is not really used to full effect, you don’t see that many elements in the game that fit the style. I did enjoy the barbershop quartet as enemies though.

Despite the remaster the game still looks very much like it did back on the original Xbox. To 2024’s standards it looks like an alpha version of a game still in production. The graphics are very basic and the levels are very vast. This means it takes longer for you to traverse a map, and with no sprint button this only prolongs the game time and causes a bit of frustration.

The game has a lot of sexual innuendos targeting a teenage and mature audience but honestly they should have removed these sexual innuendos and just targested the game towards a younger audience. As the innuendos aren’t clever or funny.

The concept of the game is fantastic, being a zombie attacking humans to spread the virus is great in theory it just needs to be better executed. A new game or sequel built from the ground up improving on the level design and bad humour would go down a storm.

Despite the game changing this up in the second half it still felt lifeless and boring. The plot was silly and the very little guidance throughout the gameplay doesn’t help with player engagement. Thankfully the game is not that long and can be completed in an afternoon. Unless you are someone with nostalgia for this game I'd suggest you give it a miss.

I play this all the time when I have friends and family over, but I always want to start from the beginning so they can see the story progression and get a proper difficulty curve (because this game gets fairly hard). Finally actually had a friend over long enough to get through the whole thing last week. It'd put it somewhere between Conker's Bad Fur Day and Octodad in terms of how how much I enjoy it as a very odd-ball, weird game that doesn't take itself seriously.

Stubbs is in the Halo engine (which becomes very obvious as soon as you come across a not-Warthog in the 2nd stage), and it plays like it. Other than the fact that Stubbs is pretty slow until you walk for a little while, where then he goes into a kind of run, and the fact that the game is 3rd person and you don't really have guns, the game controls very very much like Halo. The sticky-grenades work almost exactly the same, the co-op also works exactly the same. It controls far better than Conker's Bad Fur Day, which owes to its enjoyment, but I wouldn't say that the writing was nearly clever enough to raise it to Octodad levels of praise for me. The writing is very Duke Nukem (trying far too hard to be adult or edgy for a laugh) for the most part, and even though it's pretty darn funny sometimes (I fucking love the gas station bit), a lot of the lines, especially towards the end, come off really cringe-worthy. But to each their own on the comedy aspect.

Verdict: I'm not sure if I can justify the price for a physical copy, but if you want a fun game to plow through in 3 or 4 hours with a friend, I'd toatally recommend picking up the XBLA version (if it's still up there). Not quite sure it's worth playing through by yourself, but you have a lot of weapons and silly things to do, and the game doesn't outstay its welcome. It's a fun action game on the Xbox, and probably one of the best non-FPS exclusives for the OG Xbox.

I was a child when this was initially released. In fact, depending on the specific date, I was either in 8th grade or just going into my freshman year of high school. I was "that weird girl". You know the one. The one nobody liked or talked to because she wore unflattering clothes and didn't brush her hair and mostly liked to watch hyperviolent horror movies. With that in mind, it's of absolutely no surprise that a game such as "Stubbs the Zombie" would appeal to me.

With its retrofuturistic setting and it's comedic overtones overlayed atop a general horror concept, it's a fascinating hodgepodge of ideas that, in theory, shouldn't work together as well as they do. It's by no means perfect, but dangit, it did something truly different, especially for the time, and you have to respect it on that merit alone. It's gameplay is pretty straight forward; you play as recently deceased salesman Stubbs, who returns from the grave on the hunt for your beloved, all while utilizing your various zombie techniques to help bring down the very city that led to your untimely demise. These powers range from attaching your disembodied hand to another person to control them to throwing your own exploding organs at enemies to using your head as an explosive bowling ball of sorts. It's all kinds of ridiculous, and all kinds of fun.

But I completely understand people who maybe don't like the game. While it's core concept is unique in the sense of "Be the zombie" instead of "Kill the zombie" for a change, it's gameplay isn't all that exciting, and I think you just have to be the right kind of person to truly appreciate something of this caliber. You have to like a whole bunch of different things, and then like those things when put together. Campy b movies, comedy horror, etc. I absolutely get why this wouldn't necessarily be someone's cup of tea. That being said, there's value to it, regardless of your disinterest. It was a game that took a lot of risks, and while they might not have paid off in full, it was worth the effort.

One of the selling points that has always stuck out as strange to me, however, and was even used in promotion for the game, was the fact that it ran on the Halo engine. But this never made sense to me, as the game isn't an FPS. In fact, there's really no similarities between the two, so why they chose to really use this to push the title has always confused me, other than the obvious fact that, at the time, Halo was a giant in the field and that name recognition alone might be enough to help push sales. I still, to this day, find it strange though.

One other incredible aspect, however, was the soundtrack. Soundtracks in games have always been...strange. Rarely have there been soundtracks that mimic that of a film, with popular well known songs on them. In fact, outside of perhaps the Guitar Hero or Rock Band franchise, one offs like Parappa, and of course the Remedy titles, I have a hard time just thinking of any. But Stubbs had an honest to god soundtrack, full of classic 1950s and 1960s songs all performed by popular artists of the mid 2000s. The artists ranged from Cake, to The Flaming Lips to Phantom Planet, and it's just such a neat little thing that, unfortunately - likely due to licensing issues with the RIAA which has also hurt many television home media releases - the "remaster" for the newer consoles was missing this soundtrack almost entirely. It doesn't really ruin the game, but it's certainly a black mark on an otherwise great re-release. The only song kept over was Lollipop, and even then it'd been altered and only used on the main menu.

And while it's great that the games from the weird era of gaming, like this or Voodoo Vince or Psychonauts are still being released and are playable, it's a shame that none of them are truly remastered or remade. I was hoping these would get the "Destroy all Humans" treatment. Be all prettied up, made to look nice and shiny for the new age (which is weird for me to want because I don't care about graphics at all). But that being said, the fact that they're accessible at all, especially in an age where far too much media is vanishing at an alarming rate with little to no warning from the companies pulling it, is a godsend in and of itself.

Stubbs is a unique title from a unique time in gaming, when wacky out there concepts still had a chance to get made before the industry decided we all needed nothing but grey and brown shooters and bog standard RPGs. Back when bizarre titles like Kung-Fu-Chaos or Cel Damage had a shot at being produced, despite their overall general lack of mainstream interest or appeal. Stubbs is a treasure, even if you don't like it as a game, just because of the fact that it refused to do what everything else was doing at the time, and the fact that it took an entire genre of gameplay and turned it on its head in a rather amusing way. And, thankfully, like any good zombie, Stubbs refused to stay dead.

The remaster may not be a remake in true fashion, but hey, you can't keep a good zombie down.

I played it around 15 years ago but not finished at that time. Now I recalled warm feelings about the game and finally decided to complete it.
This game made me hate it at last.
Despite weird but funny humour and characters, cool atmosphere, game spoiled my relationship to it by redundant difficulty.
I tried to complete penultimate level for maybe 20 time or something just because authors decided not to put checkpoints on the levels. So that just random rocket or too careless playing made me die time by time and repeat level again and again. Finally I spent on it maybe same time as on the rest of the game. I even had to reduce difficulty from hard to normal but it didn't help a lot. Only my perfectionism helped me to finish this level and entire game. So finally I felt this game like a wasting of time.
My recommendation if you had similar feeling about the game from the past just to leave them as is. Unfortunately you can not step into the same river twice.