Not Dying Today

Not Dying Today is a 2D side-scrolling beat-em-up from 9TH.ART, set in a zombified 2030 America where Captain Aiden, a cowboy-adjacent soldier type, is the last line between humanity and a very hungry horde. The premise is thin on paper, and the comic-panel cutscenes that stitch the seven chapters together do not add much weight to it. Growling zombies, a stoic grunt, and not a lot of wit in between. The story is the weakest part, and anyone hoping for even a sliver of narrative craft should dial expectations down considerably. Where the game finds its footing is in the actual feel of moving through a level. You carry a melee weapon and a ranged weapon into each stage, choosing from a pool of 12 melee options and 10 ranged, each with genuinely different behavior: area-of-effect crowd clearers, single-target stun weapons, burn-damage tools that keep ticking after the hit. Grenades, sentry guns, and health packs round out a loadout of nine additional items. Before each chapter you allocate stat points across Strength, Life, Agility, and Luck, keeping a light RPG spine under the brawling. The standout mechanic is the mutation bar: kill enough zombies and Aiden transforms into a super-zombie form, invincible to damage and very good at tearing things apart. It is short-lived and satisfying in the way a good screen-clear power should be. Difficulty is the variable that changes the experience most dramatically. Normal mode is forgiving to the point of being dull in the standard levels, but bosses across all difficulties hit hard and require actual preparation. The game quietly lets you carry your level and gear across difficulty runs, so grinding on Easy before tackling Hell mode is a legitimate and sensible strategy. Beyond the main campaign, Boss Arena lets you pit yourself against multiple bosses simultaneously, with customizable opponent combinations, and Endless Mode is a wave-survival loop on a single closed map. Both are entertaining for an hour or two, though Endless in particular starts showing the shallowness of the combat fairly quickly once the novelty fades. Local co-op for up to four players is the game's clearest selling point and the lens through which it is best judged. With a couch full of people, the chaos masks the repetition, the bosses feel like genuine group events, and the leaderboards give something to argue about afterward. Controller support works, mostly, though there have been reported hiccups with certain setups. The Saturday-morning cartoon visual style is colorful and readable, and the enemy design has some personality, from syringe-throwing zombie nurses in the opening hospital stage to Screamer zombies with loudspeakers strapped to their heads. It is not a game that invites slow contemplation or rewards repeated solo playthroughs, but it knows what it is, mostly, and the moments when it commits fully to its own B-movie energy are genuinely fun. Kai, Scout Team