Zombi is, as many of you already know, an enhanced port of ZombiU, a launch title for the WiiU. While it was a pretty good game overall, it wasn't really well-received, and I always thought that was unfortunate because I enjoyed it a lot.
Zombi is a game that puts a big emphasis on death, and features two different gameplay modes to accomodate this. The first Standard mode, which is more like the death mechanic used in the Souls series. When you first start the game you get a random character with a quick explanation of his or her name and occupation, and that's your character. A single zombie bite will kill you, though they usually attack through swipes unless they catch you off guard. If you die in this mode, your character is permanently killed, and a new survivor arrives at the safe house for you to play as. If you can get to your old survivor without dying, you can regain your items, but if you die again, all of the items from the original survivor are gone, barring the ones that can't be taken from you like the cricket bat and flashlight. In the second mode, Survival, more inspired by rogue-likes, the stakes are even higher and if you die then that's it; the game's over.
The two options each come with a "Chicken" difficulty setting that makes them easier, but if you're the person that would actually pick a difficulty like that then I'd recommend just playing another game because the big draw of the game is the tension that it builds from making your character so vulnerable. Ammo and guns are relatively scarce, so you'll be forced into close melee encounters pretty often, and even though your backpack holds a decent amount of items you'll quickly find that it never feels like quite enough, creating a risk vs reward situation where you have to decide whether you want to keep moving forward or if you should head back to the safe house to put some items into storage to make room. Certain areas may change when you leave and return, like a certain area that sometimes may only be gently raining, only to turn into a downpour similar to Left 4 Dead 2's Hard Rain when you return and making things a lot harder to see.
As far as the improvements go, they're a bit hard to tell. The PC port, performance-wise, is fairly good for me, but I'm not really a good judge of that since I have pretty good specs. It supports high framerates and has an FOV slider that works well enough that I didn't feel the need to look for an external fix, and while graphically it seems like all they've done is enhance the textures and let it run in higher resolutions, the game already had a good enough art direction on the WiiU that it manages to look well enough. There isn't much in the way of graphical settings, however (aside from things like vsync and resolution, you can't really change much at all), so if you're worried you won't be able to run it it may be best to wait and hear other peoples' experiences. Gameplay-wise they've thankfully included the drag-and-drop inventory management, and the controls are all around pretty fairly adapted. They've also added two new melee weapons to break up the monotony of the cricket bat (which was one of the bigger complaints about the original game, since you do end up using it a lot) that have different attack styles and do varying amounts of damage. The removal of the WiiU gamepad element has somewhat lessened some of the effects the original game had, but not by much - you don't have the tension of having to look at a second screen to manage your inventory and hoping that nothing is coming towards you on the main screen anymore, for instance, but the mechanics are still adapted enough that I don't think it impacts the game very much.
Another thing that should be noted is that all online functions seem to be gone, as far as I can tell. The local multiplayer function (which was basically just Zombie Master in ZombiU, so it's not a huge loss to the PC crowd anyways) was already known to be gone, but they also seem to have removed the online features where you could leave tagged messages for other players and also potentially find zombified players with the supplies they had on them when they died in their game. It may just be that I'm not far enough in to remember when those begin to occur, though, since it's been 3 years since I played ZombiU.
Overall, Zombi is a fine game if you haven't burnt out on zombie games yet. It takes what would normally be a pretty tired concept by now and spices things up by making your deaths count and turning zombies into actual threats instead of cannon fodder. As a $60 WiiU game it might've been hard to recommend, but for $20 I think it's a great price for a pretty fun game.