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New York's had Grand Theft Auto 4, Paris had Broken Sword and Tokyo's had both Jet Set Radio and The World Ends With You, but London's never really had the same treatment. There's been the rubble-rousing rewritten history of Resistance, or the city seen through a Guy Ritchie filter in The Getaway, but there's never been a game set in the London that I live in, the London that's equal parts mystery and misery, where Hawksmoor spires pop up in the middle of dreary council estates. ZombiU's come close to that. It's a caricature, for sure - this is London as seen through an outsider's lens, and it's not just the undead mob that ensures this is a replica riddled with improbability. The geography's brilliantly scattershot, an album of tourist snapshots all haphazardly sewn together; Brick Lane doesn't rub up quite so close to Buckingham Palace in the real world, unfortunately, and I think some of the level artists got off at the wrong stop when they went looking for Green Park.
There's a cartoony overstatement to it all, a hangover perhaps from its former life as Killer Freaks from Outer Space, but the tone's resoundingly bleak. This is the London of lonely late nights and damp grey dawns that Jack the Ripper stalked, and the one that's riddled with traces of the occult. It's the dark, enigmatic city that Alan Moore explored in From Hell, a place where the letters of 16th century alchemist John Dee mix in with the urban flotsam of discarded newspapers and burger wrappers.
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