This week, Morgan is inducted into the modern trend of shooting swathes of zombies, the sheep.

Nazi zombies always feel like overkill to me. We already dislike regular zombies; their intent to nosh on our balls makes them rather awkward dinner companions. Proceeding to then also make them Nazis feels like an unsubtle method to get us more invested in survival since not being eaten alive apparently isn’t a good enough motivation by today’s standards. It’s been done to death by now: video games, films, even that Jane Austen parody (although those zombies were aristocrats, so pick your poison I suppose). But here comes Zombie Army Trilogy, convinced it can still wring a few more pennies out of the neighbourhood and I’ve got to admit, it’s got some real steel down under for daring to shows its face on my Steam page.

Granted, the only reason it garnered my attention from amongst the avalanche of soiled nappies that is the zombie genre was because of the annual Winter Sale. Maybe this signifies a new business strategy on Steam’s part: put it at 90% off over the festive period and then people will be too busy slipping into a coma of Bailey’s Irish Cream to notice their quality recognition instincts squealing in agony.

Right out of the gate, the problem (and by this I refer to the massive underlying problem upon which all the other problems scuttle and defecate) is that this game is a collection of DLC from the Sniper Elite series. Props to them for doing what Call of Duty adamantly refuses to by just releasing the zombie bits as its own separate thing, but when you think of a gameplay loop based around precision sniping, the next words that pop into your head probably aren’t undead hordes.

I’ve never played a Sniper Elite game, but from what I can gather it involves a lot of time spent just squatting in a bush watching your target’s movements before eventually releasing that sweet, sweet puff of cordite and watching their head turn inside-out. I’m sure this offers the final kill some sense of catharsis, though I can say for definite that this isn’t the case when every enemy in the same postcode as you knows your location from the word “go”.

There seems to be an increasingly-transparent trend amongst the games I’ve reviewed lately, namely this, Doom and Bendy and the Ink Machine. Tell me if anything sounds familiar: some nutcase with a level of authority completely disproportional to his intelligence faces hard times, he tries to harness a supernatural entity and, in academic terms, sh*t gets f*cked.

In this week’s edition of Who is in Serious Need of a Managerial Review, we focus on Hitler, who’s rather bummed about losing the Second World War and promptly decides that the most logical and level-headed response is to raise the dead. You play as one of sixteen different operatives being sent over to jolly well sort things out and… well, that’s about it. Due to undisclosed reasons the game never bothers to explain, these operatives will now travel from abandoned village to abandoned village, shooting zombies for the rest of time. Maybe if they’re feeling up it, they’ll be killing zombie Hitler later on or something else completely obvious.

If I were drawing comparisons gameplay-wise, I’d call this poor man’s Left 4 Dead. And I mean really poor. As in, the-bargain-bin-of-the-last-Blockbuster-Video-on-Earth-poor, even down to having playable Left 4 Dead characters, not as a mod, but as part of the base game itself. For those of you unfamiliar with the formula, there’s a series of campaigns set up as linear maps with safe rooms and checkpoints every so often (and yeah, let’s just stick points for refugees out in the middle of undead-infested territory. I’m sure they’ll be just dandy). You’ll occasionally be given an objective to fulfil as you go along, but you don’t have to pay them any attention, not really: just follow the waypoints and if a door is blocked off by symbols of a satanic ritual, just sit tight and try not to get mauled for the next few minutes.

…blimey, that was a weird sentence.

They’re deceptively long campaigns, too; every time I thought I was close to finishing one, the game would conjure another brigade of the bastards just to bring the pacing to another screeching halt. It tries to spice things up the same way that the addition of live bait spices up a bag of Haribo Starmix, introducing a few special types of zombies, none of them particularly inventive in any way: one runs screaming at you before exploding when close enough, swinging a hand grenade around with such vigour you kill him partially just to give the poor bloke a rest. Then there’s the real spider in the porridge, the meaty lads with fully-functioning machine guns who can tank a frankly insane eight direct headshots. You can land hit after hit as they casually saunter up to you like they’re about to pull the stretch-and-yawn, and all you’ll get to show for it when they’re blasting you six thousand extra nostrils is a slightly ruffled hairdo.

The inherent tedium of slogging through each hour-long mission means I’ve only completed six of fifteen (five per game) as of time of writing. They do get slightly better I guess; the addition of NPCs by game three made it feel less like I was somehow the only person on planet Earth who’d happened to notice that all of Berlin had taken an apocalypse up the arse. But don’t fill those BAFTA nominations just yet, as there’s still one looming pile of guano on the tracks ahead of the complaint train: the music.

“Really, Morgan? That’s what you’re so worked up about? The music? Do you always kick off if the composer fails to meet your melodic standards?”

No, Echoing Voice from the Void, I really don’t. No-one ever does. So just imagine how bad it actually has to be for me to spend a whole paragraph describing it. Repeating rhythm after repeating rhythm, which only gets louder when the hordes grew bigger, to an extent implying only complete bone-idleness. Either that or the developers were a real bitch about paying overtime, and the composer limited the music for each level to twenty seconds tops in revenge.

Bad or broken games like Bioshock 2 or Bendy and the Ink Machine will always stick with me, even if it’s only because I’ve happened to catch whatever disease they were infected with when they stumbled onto my hard drive and threw up all over the motherboard. Something like Zombie Army Trilogy will be lucky to remain in my memory even two weeks after I finally stop playing it, because there’s nothing interesting about it all – not even in a negative sense. It’s fully functional, but that’s it. Even the trademark, tarted-up, slow-motion kills you get when you pull off a headshot at a far enough distance become no more than piss in the wind. The original Sniper Elite games, I gather, are there to give you the experience of overcoming unbelievable odds and becoming the hunter, not the hunted.

And can’t we end up shooting some other zombified Nazi leader by the end? I heard that Heinrich Himmler was a nasty piece of work, surely it’s his turn to get a lobotomy by bullet sometime now?