10 Ways To Use The Wii U Tablet Controller To Conquer "ZombiU"

Sitting down to play ZombiU at Comic-Con, I was basically already sold on the game. Ubisoft has been hitting it out of the park lately; it's been quite a while since they released anything that was less than stellar.

So I went in with high hopes, and I wasn't disappointed. The level Ubisoft was demoing took place near Buckingham Palace, of all places, a location seldom portrayed in games despite its instant recognizability.

The Wii U tablet controller will definitely take some getting used to—the sensitivity on the sticks seemed way too high, and there isn't another modern controller with the face buttons below the right stick.

I was thankful every time the game reminded me to glance down at the tablet's screen, no matter much it killed my immersion. And playing ZombiU, you'll be looking at the tablet a lot. Here are ten ways that makes ZombiU a better game.

ZombiU aims to eliminate the pain of checking every enemy and crate for loot by allowing you to scan the environment ahead of time with the Wii U tablet. Pressing a button and holding it up to the screen turns on what's essentially X-ray vision.

It's not actually faster than just checking each container manually, since you still have to scan each and every one individually. But the Ubisoft rep walking me through the demo pointed out that the ability can come in extremely handy when there's a zombie or two (or more) between you and the nearest ammo crate.

When you finally do get around to looting something, you'll once again be staring at the tablet screen. Walk up to a lootable container—be it an actual container or a downed undead—and the game will inform you whether or not there's anything to be had from it.

When you press the loot button, the character on-screen hunches over the container, showing you only his back. On the Wii U controller's screen, however, appears the contents of the container, and you can drag and drop into your own inventory as you please.

Speaking of your inventory—loot, weapon switching and inventory management are all handled via the tablet controller's touch screen. You can drag items around at will to rearrange them, and even drag them up to a "hot bar" that stays at the top of the tablet when you close the inventory.

The hot bar is a great place to store weapons, flashlights and more, and you can switch between them with a tap on the screen. Like every other aspect of the new controller, this will take some getting used to, but I imagine that it'll eventually be quite intuitive.

The tablet screen has plenty of application in combat, as well, not the least of which is the ability to zoom in with certain weapons. Trailers have shown off a sniper rifle with a scope, but in the demo I got to use something a little sneakier: the crossbow.

The crossbow itself is all but silent, and zooming in allows you to gain some accuracy, assuring you won't need more than one shot—a good thing, since reloading the damn thing takes forever. And using the tablet screen as a scope—motion controls and all, which I'm normally somewhat averse to—felt great.

In most games, picking a lock involves a superficial skill check or, at most, a time-wasting mini-game. ZombiU doesn't quite side-step this issue, but it does offer a neat take on it by moving the lockpicking activity down to the tablet screen and turning the TV into a rear view mirror of sorts.

As you align the lock mechanisms on the controller, zombies continue to approach from the rear (if there are any in the immediate area), turning what would otherwise be a trivial time-waster into a tension-filled hurdle.

Much like the lockpicking mini-game, attempting to bypass a door's entry keypad will throw the action onto the controller's touch screen and turn the TV view around. I didn't actually get to try this in the demo, and it's unclear exactly how the game works—I'm assuming it's more than just pressing random numbers until you get one right, since the zombies would surely win most times in that case.

Either way, this is a great example of how the Wii U's tablet takes something that would be ordinary on any other system and makes it into something exceptional. There's no better way to make you rush through a mini-game than by letting you watch the brain-munchers approaching from your rear.

Another important feature that has been in trailers, but that I didn't get a chance to try out, is the sonar. It acts as a radar, allowing you to scan the environment for unseen enemies and (possibly) other hazards.

From the trailers it appears that moving the Wii U tablet around will allow you to cast the sonar in different directions, highlighting separate swathes of the environment to see what's hiding unseen behind doors and walls. Sure, plenty of games have radars, but few require you to take your eyes off the main screen to view them, so the sonar could definitely add to the tension in ZombiU.

Shaking a controller to break free from an enemy's grasp has been commonplace since developers started shoehorning it into Wii and PS3 games. ZombiU's "break free" function seems little different, and I can't affirm or refute that, since I was so liberal with my shotgun headshots during the demo that no zombie ever got close to me.

To be fair, I was probably playing on the easiest setting. And there were a few times when it did come pretty close, like when I ran out of shotgun ammo and had to switch back to the pistol on the fly. I forgot where to look (a problem that will hopefully be alleviated as we get used to the tablet screen) and gave a zombie an opportunity to close in. Luckily, I had a melee weapon and switched to it without further delay.

One other function that I'm very sorry I didn't get the chance to experience is the ability to execute generous finishing moves in certain situations. Again, this is viewable in the trailer, although the opportunity never came up during my demo.

With a hatchet or other badass melee weapon, you'll sometimes get the opportunity to perform a brutal melee combo, swinging the tablet right and left to chop deep into that undead flesh. Hopefully the tablet ships with a wrist strap, or early adopters might be breaking more than just their TV screens with these moves.

Possibly the coolest application I've seen of the Wii U's tablet controller yet came in a demonstration of ZombiU's multiplayer at a different event, behind a curtain at Nintendo's Gaming Lounge during Comic-Con. It's the first real application I've seen of the Wii U's varied controller types being used for asymmetrical multiplayer gameplay.

Essentially, one player uses the new "classic" controller—which is similar to a modern Xbox 360 controller—to play in a first-person shooter fashion similar to the single-player missions. But the other player uses the tablet to spawn and direct hordes of zombies with the controller's screen showing a view of the entire map.

The player with the tablet is essentially playing a real-time strategy game, deploying forces (zombies) to capture flags, while the player with the classic controller battles the zombies from a first-person view while also trying to capture flags.

There are plenty of interesting and new elements to this mode—for example, the person with the tablet can see the whole battlefield, and can look up at the TV to see what their opponent is doing. The person playing on the TV, however, is limited to what they can see from their first-person vantage. That alone proves to me that the Wii U is capable of some incredible new types of gameplay.