Ray's the Dead has been in development for a long time, but it's now finally shuffled onto PlayStation 4. As the name implies, you play as Ray, brought back from the dead under mysterious circumstances. In order to discover what's going on in the 80s inspired town, Ray must use his zombie abilities to resurrect others, defeat enemies, and solve environmental puzzles.

Certain corpses can be zombified, and that includes baddies you beat. After building a small army of the undead, you can command them to attack on your behalf, crawl through holes to reach new areas, and more. Some levels take you back in time to when Ray was alive, so there's also a two-pronged story going on in the background. It's all presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner, with nice cartoonish visuals and silly writing. It's all very novel, leading a dozen zombies through linear levels as you unravel the truth.

Gameplay is where things start to rot, though. Combat devolves to waiting for an enemy's green outline and then spamming X to send your zombies in for the kill. There's not much more strategy to engagements than that, really, although you can opt to regain some lost health by consuming a bad guy's brains before they kick the bucket. There are batteries to find to increase your health, and gravestones to read, but the levels themselves bounce from small combat zones to simple puzzles. Unfortunately, poor performance means controls are sluggish and the frame rate dips like mad when the screen is busy. There's some fun to be extracted from this, especially given that Halloween is upon us, but sadly this is a game that won't live long in the memory.