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 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.

Beat the first handful of levels, saw I had about a dozen left, and decided life's too short. I wanted to rate this higher for the fun concept & charmingly dumb comedy, but I can't ignore the sheer lack of entertainment value I got from it. The game pushes you to build up a Pikmin-esque zombie horde which you can use to distract & overwhelm enemies, but either there's a limit on how many zombies can follow you at a time or their AI won't listen because it's just plain shit, and given their janky pathfinding, I'm inclined to pick the second option. And when they do come to your aid, the cheeky bastards then go and eat the brains that you need to regain your health & power-ups - although with that said, the power-ups are quite limited in range, take ages to recharge, and are all frankly a bit crap. The game has a nice spoof retrofuturist setting - i.e. 1950s metropolis but with friendly robots & flying cars - but the actual levels seem to be split between overly vast and sparse exteriors or sprawling labyrinthine interiors, which isn't ideal when the game is rubbish at conveying which way you're meant to go. Each level holds a half-dozen clusters of angry NPCs scattered around aimlessly, waiting to demolish your health in mere seconds, and the combat feels TERRIBLE. You can instantly tear into the craniums of weak starting enemies, but beyond that you get legions of armed cops who must be tediously button-mashed to death before you can recruit them to your cadaverous cause, and so you just have to trudge through level after level of 'punch, punch, punch, zombify' repeated over & over. I did have a glimmer of hope at the first boss fight, in which you play a game of Simon to simulate a pitched dance battle against the chief of police, although the banging covers of mid-century pop classics were slightly let down by the quite badly timed button prompts. But in the end, I just couldn't carry on with the slog that this game was already turning into. R.I.P. Stubbs!

I was thoroughly charmed, and had a stupid grin on my face the entire time.

P.S. This game's OST is actually really fucking good, like way better than this game actually deserves. It features a lot of notable alternative artists from the early-to-mid 2000s (Death Cab for Cutie, Cake, Rouge Wave, Flaming Lips etc) doing modern takes on songs from the 1950s and 60s and it slaps hard. I hate saying that I listen to game OSTs because I have sex and a normal social life (trust me, these facets of character surprise me just as much as they do you), but I relistened to this OST more times than I have seen my own brother.

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.

Stubbs the Zombie (the game, not the guy) drops you a swastika in the first five minutes of the game, during the initial cutscene. That alone should tell you what kind of game this is. In the city of Punchbowl, a stereotypical 50s retro-futuristic American city, Stubbs (the guy) emerges from the ground with no mission other than to eat and kill everything on his way. That’s the premise and that’s what happens in the gameplay part of the game, you go around eating and killing people. The arsenal which Stubbs makes use of is rather limited. He can punch enemies to weaken and eat them afterwards, but he can also fart so hard that everyone near gets instantly debilitated. There’s also the hand, which can be used to take control of literally any enemy, which means that you can turn the game into a third person shooter when enemies with guns start showing up. You can also use your organs as remotely-detonated grenades and throw your head like an also remotely-detonated bowling ball to kill anyone affected by the explosion and turn them into zombies. Aaaaand… That’s it. I know this is a five hour game about eating brains, but the mechanics don’t seem to evolve at all during the whole game. Apart from being introduced to each one of them individually at the start of the game. You can also drive jeeps and tanks (they control exactly like the jeeps and tanks from Halo: Combat Evolved because it and Stubbs run on the same engine btw), but they appear just a few times and in the last levels, so it’s not like there’s much room for experimentation.

If all you want is being a zombie, this game delivers just that, but don’t expect much else from it. Thankfully it has a lot of charisma and personality which is what actually makes it stand out. Stubbs is, simply put, the coolest mf alive. I don’t care that all he says is just “nggggguuuuuuhhhhh” and “braaaaaaainzz”, listen to his motivational speech and tell me you don’t get pumped up. Every cutscene oozes charisma and this game is, thematically, very interesting to say the least. But the problem here is that the cool parts take place only on the cutscenes. If you don’t care about this, you might have fun, but for a game that is so wacky, being stuck with a tedious gameplay loop that sooner than later turns this wild premise into an uninteresting chore shows some serious untapped potential which would have made this an incredible time. In fact, the best part of the game is the first half, because it inserts new mechanics in interesting ways (it gives you a dedicated button to pee in one level) at a slow pace and you go after various unique characters with their dedicated boss fights and after that half ends, it doesn’t seem to know what to do and ends up feeling unnecessarily stretched. One of the first boss battles in the game is a lengthy Simon Says dance battle (you SHALL listen to this unexpected banger) and the last boss battle is damaging shields until they break and a cutscene plays. Some of the boss battles from the second half are badly designed and it’s never clear what you exactly have to do, but turns out it’s just damaging enemies. Stubbs the Zombie is a game that has charisma and made me laugh, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t bore the fuck out of me most of the time.

One of the most charming games I've ever played, definitely a destroy all humans esq vibe with really fun gameplay

You can throw your kidney at people to explode, use your head as a bowling ball, posses people and of course make a lethal fart

A classic

Sometimes it's best to simply continue enjoying your good memories of games from your childhood. They can remain there in their idealized form, never tainted by being experienced by an adult with a (mostly) fully-functioning brain and sense of taste. This is why Goldeneye is so popular.

Stubbs the Zombie is a game with an interesting premise. You play as a zombie in a retro-futurist 1950s "City of Tomorrow", amassing a zombie army and trying to make your way to a lady with huge jugs that you saw on TV. I can relate to this. Unfortunately, that premise is under-utilized to an almost shocking degree.

The first project from Wideload Games, a studio made up of former Bungie developers (including Bungie's co-founder!), Stubbs was also made on the Halo engine. This was important enough to be noted on the game's cover, but in practice, it only serves to explain why there are huge, mostly empty levels, terrible vehicle segments, and an incredibly inconsistent checkpointing system.

From the concept, you would expect this to be like some sort of gorefest Pikmin, turning hapless citizens into zombies that do your bidding. There are attempts at that sort of thing, as you can whistle to your zombies to make them come to you, or shove them to make them move in a specific direction, but that's as far as it goes. Later on, they'll die before they can do any significant damage to enemies, and mostly act as distractions for you. Which is important, because your combat skills are severely lacking.

Before you can chomp down on some cerebral chili con carne, you have to stun the humans. Most of the time, you do this with a standard 3 hit combo. It feels like crap, and you can also get critical hits that knock their heads off, depriving you of a minion. If you hit them while they're stunned, they'll die and still turn into a zombie, but you won't get health back. Not that it matters, I guess, because you can still be shot while you're in the brain-eating animation.

You have other abilities. They're mostly useless. The one you want is the gut-grenade, especially because sometimes enemies will be in high places you can't reach, or flying around on jetpacks. If you don't have grenades saved up, haha, good luck. You also have an explosive gas that stuns enemies as long as they're within about 10 inches of you, a bowling ball head move that leaves your body vulnerable, and the ability to possess humans via your detached hand. This is occasionally useful, but again causes the problem of leaving a bunch of non-zombified corpses around.

Really, the biggest problem with the game is, perhaps ironically, how lifeless it all is. You get a few cutscenes that are... Attempting humor. That's about it. The interesting setting is almost entirely ignored, as you spend half of the game roaming around farms, laboratories, dams, etc. As mentioned earlier, these levels are often huge, sometimes maze-like, and always barren. Oh, and despite the incredible soundtrack featuring some of the most popular indie bands of the time doing kickass covers of old-timey classics, there's pretty much no music in the actual game. You hear about 30 seconds from a few of the songs during one boss battle, and that's it. Those songs never appear anywhere in the game. You're mostly listening to silence with the same few repeated voice lines and screams for the entire duration.

[Edit: This is partly a result of the current port being clumsily slapped together. There were a couple of instances in the original game where the music appeared during gameplay, but even then, it was very rare. It's not a licensing issue, because they're still present during that boss battle, it's a programming issue.]

After this game, Wideload would make Hail to the Chimp, a very poorly-timed presidential party game (it was released for the 2008 election...) And then they made some Disney shovelware before being unceremoniously shuttered.

It's odd that this came out the same year as Destroy All Humans, because they're almost companion pieces, both in subject matter and tone. DAH was undoubtedly more successful in every respect, despite spawning several low-quality sequels, and I would recommend checking out the Re-Probed remake. Do not bother with Stubbs. Let him rest in the ground where he belongs.

[Note: I gave this an extra half-star simply for causing the soundtrack to exist]

A+ concept with a very nice ending. That's it. Maybe the single most boring game I've ever played. Definitely not but I haven't slogged my way through a game like this in what feels like a long while. Almost feels unfinished. A blueprint for a much better game with levels that aren't completely barren and uninspired (and in THIS kind of setting that's actually pretty hard to do) and gameplay that isn't wonky and annoying as all can be (and not just because you're playing as a zombie). Was making use of all the zombie moves available to get through it which is always nice to see. Doesn't excuse the complete lack of gameplay variety though (rhythm game, while not hard, annoyed me so much I almost put a hole in my wall) and it really would've made a gigantic difference if it was actually fun to fight/devour humans here. Was looking forward to this game for a long time but it legitimately feels like I'm being punk'd with all these positive reviews. Good for everyone who got a lot out of this but also WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU

A pretty wacky and amusing game.
You're a zombie and you're goal is to cause as much chaos as possible in a city.
The entire story and setting is presented in a pretty comedic manner.
The Gameplay itself is fine. When you unlock abilities like controlling somebody with your hand or using your head as an explosive bowling ball, it further accentuates the comedic nature of this game.
I found the enemy design to be a bit lacking and some levels can get on your nerves, but it's still an overall enjoyable experience.
Game is pretty short and can be beaten in around 4-5 hours.

Fun Fact: This is one of two games that uses the Halo: Combat Evolved game engine.