Nonstop carnage is on the menu in Konamiâs Zombie Apocalypse, which brings gamesâ undying affinity for the undead to a top-down, multidirectional shooter. Does it also hold the same appeal when itâs one â or four â against a thousand?
Loved
Senseless Slaughter: Who wouldnât want to go up against an undead horde with unlimited ammo? No matter how bad it gets, you may still battle this game from that expectation â shooting the limbs off a staggering, growling mob that obligingly stands there and takes it. As a top-down shooter, you run around firing Robotron-style with your right analog. Itâs like putting out a fire, really. Zombie Apocalypse quickly ramps up the difficulty by throwing different zombie classes at you whose behavior make your task a little less straightforward. Youâll definitely come to hate the mewling dodgers, those fat-ass construction men, who pancake you with no chance to break free, and those pragnent zombie ladies shitting out fruit-fly spawn that can rip out your spine. Let me reserve a special word of hate for the crazed, dynamite-carrying kamikazes. Still, no matter what youâre facing, when you think about Zombie Apocalypse thereâs always a nagging thought you can do better the next time.
Hated
Singleminded Singleplayer: This is a game built for multiplayer and if you play it primarily for that reason, itâll be a satisfying and even delightful experience. But if you bought it and have no one to play with â or, as I found, have repeated matchmaking problems â it will grow very old and repetitive after the first time you confront the Flesh Pile, which I think is around day 30. (The Flesh Pile is giant bleeding placenta-looking thing that shoots death rays and barfs out zombies.) You only get four different boards to play, and when that variety runs out, then you can play them in blackout mode, and when that variety runs out, then the normal zombies you face become superpowered nukeular zombies, and you progress through their ranks much as you did during your first tour of the undead. Itâs very repetitive if youâre going it alone. The good news is you have unlimited continues. But Day 54 is just utterly interminable (youâll need to kill more than 1,500 zombies, proceeding through waves of every single type, and then their atomic flavors) and for the conclusion it provides, Day 55 is a total waste of time if youâre fighting the final Flesh Pile alone.
Weapons Balance: Itâs bad when you avoid some specialty weapons because your base weapon, the assault rifle, is more effective. The rocket launcher and the sniper rifle had poor areas of affect, considering what you were dealing with, and atrocious rates of fire. The molotovs werenât much better. The grenade launcher was surprisingly effective, mostly because of an amped-up rate of fire, even if the grenades had a delayed burst effect. By far the best weapon is the flamethrower â which is even better than the gatling gun. But every time youâre praying for one to drop you always get the goddamn sniper, or maybe the dual wield submachine guns if youâre less unlucky. You only get one grenade attack per board â which can be replaced if you rescue a civilian. But deploying it, a teddy bear strapped with explosives, is grating to the extreme because of the conspicuous, Barney-parody dialogue (âIâm stuffed with love! â and C4 âŠâ) it insists on reciting every time itâs on the ground. Finally, Zombie Apocalypse bragged about its environmental kills, but I found them to be more cosmetic than useful. Zombies wonât stagger or shamble into the woodchipper, you have to shove them there with gunfire, which is more trouble than it is worth. Even the exploding barrels are too sparse to really help you in your job as an undead pest control technician.
Zombie Apocalypse absolutely delivers in the carnage apartment department (Jesus, Owen âŠ) but I would have loved to see the environment more involved. Alone against the amoeba-like horde, I tried to use the boardâs obstacles to funnel the undead into killzones. But really any plan to use the environment to your advantage is going to break down after three seconds of standing in the same place. You just need to shoot everything and run, and in most cases that wonât be enough without backup. Definitely fun when youâre playing with more than one. Alone, itâs not worth it after about 20 levels.
Zombie Apocalypse was developed by Nihilistic Software and published by Konami for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Available on Xbox Live Arcade for 800 points and PlayStation Network for $9.99. The game was provided to Kotaku for reviewing purposes. Played all game types in singleplayer, completing the 55-day campaign, and tested multiplayer mode.
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