Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse review

Undead hero Stubbs pees in the man's water supply. From his fetid bowels emerge meaty, disgusting blasts to choke his foes. There is no man, or any former man, like him for eating brains. He is the antihero's antihero, a stinky decomposing wreck who will not tug at anyone's heartstrings, but will oftentimes stop to rip someone's arm off and then beat them to death with it.

As Stubbs, players must tear down a video utopia brick by stinking brick. The game plays out in the third-person perspective, and all the missions are more or less a variation on the same-junk-different-day theme: Stubbs invades, eats brains to create more zombies, wrecks stuff and moves on. He has some weird, creepy powers, including a detachable hand to possess unwitting humans, an explosive and removable head, guts that can be hurled as grenades for destructive effect and an ass like eight miles of toxic waste-laden New Jersey highway. Yet all Stubbs' varied abilities add up to much ado about nothing; the game hammers on one note for about eight hours or so until the end credits roll.

Still, there's a lot to like about Stubbs. At one point, after tearing through a police station, the zombie encounters a diminutive police chief, and the two, for no discernable reason, enter into a dance-off. It's here developer Wideload cleverly tips its hat to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," with Stubbs trying to match the chief step-for-step in a minigame ripped directly from the children's handeld memory game Simon.