Moving Hazard is, at first glance, your typical tactical, team-based military shooter. There’s several loadouts with weapons like assault rifles, and the point is to take out the enemy team before they do you.
The big difference is the zombies that you can weaponize.
The multiplayer game’s premise is that the military essentially created a biological weapon that turned folks into zombies — a weapon they intended to keep contained in small pockets, but things went wrong, and suddenly, the world was covered in zombies, with the remaining pockets of humanity fighting over resources — which is how humans end up fighting each other with zombies everywhere.
The big draw of Moving Hazard from developers Psyop Games and Illfonic is using those otherwise neutral zombies to attack your enemies. The Pheromone Attractor Molotov — or PAM, for short — essentially turns any zombies it hits into a roving hit squad that’s specifically out to maim and kill the opposing team. Zombies will always shamble about and try to bite nearby humans, but they’re actively murderous when hit with the PAM.
However, PAM doesn’t last forever, and it’s really only effective up to a certain distance. If the zombies can’t locate anyone nearby, they’ll just sit and try to sniff one out. It also eventually wears off, so enemy players need only to stay out of range of any undead with red mist hovering about them. Also complicating matters? Players only spawn with two PAM, and seemingly, the only way to get more is to kill enemy players.
There are other grenade-like objects, too, though PAM is by far the most useful. There’s a more defensive one that essentially draws all nearby zombie attention until it runs out. During my demo, which was on a two versus two map featuring rotating area objectives each team could hold for points, the defensive grenade saved my life more than once, but it was far more satisfying whenever I could use a PAM.
The actual maps and gun-based combat worked well enough. There are three classes in Moving Hazard — Light, Medium and Heavy — each with unique loadouts available to them. The Light class, for example, starts with a crossbow that can only fire one shot at a time, but it also immediately kills enemies. Also? It’s silent, meaning it draws less attention from zombies.
One sticky bit in my demo was that I was never exactly sure whether I was winning or losing, and the ending scoreboard didn’t help much. Every kill and bit of area-holding counted toward winning, and I might have just missed notifications indicating being near victory, but yeah. Every single match ended with a surprised “oh, it’s over” from me. Even so, it’s certainly one I’ll be keeping an eye on going forward, given how much fun I had in my brief experience.
Moving Hazard is scheduled to release in Early Access on PC soon, with a full release following at least a couple of months after.
