Gamers have a love for zombies that is so strong, I’m sure there is a secret lab of gamers trying to create a zombie apocalypse to justify their purchase of zombie games to their parents and imaginary girlfriends, and I myself love zombies. I don’t know why, they’re just awesome; if you make a World War II game but replace the Nazis with Nazi zombies, then that’s just awesome; If you take the American wild west and fill it with zombies, then that’s just awesome; even data processing might be awesome if you are fighting zombies at the same time. Consequentially, Nihilistic Software and Konami released Zombie Apocalypse, a top-down shoot ’em up for the PSN and the XBLA.
The story, like most downloadable games, is virtually non-existent. The game’s title is the whole story; there are zombies and you have a gun, do the math. You get to choose from four characters, a la Left 4 Dead, but it’s kind of pointless because they’re all the same except for appearance, they also all start with the same weapon and have the same number of lives. The four characters are really for the multiplayer mode.
The gameplay is just pure arcade shooting; you, the player, must survive through 55 levels with eight lives by killing zombies and racking up multipliers and environment kills, also you must save survivors (who are all middle-class, business women) by protecting them from the zombie hordes. Saving survivors results in getting a hilarious special weapon; a teddy bear, zombie bait filled with explosives that decimates all zombies surrounding it. You also get weapons that randomly appear to help you along your quest for zombie genocide but I didn’t get to the end to know if there are more weapons. You start with the standard machine gun with unlimited ammo and chainsaw, a device that I think was solely created to attack zombies but since that didn’t happen we now use it for trees to prepare because as we all know zombies have an unnatural attraction to forests and creepy woods. Weapons that randomly appear and have limited ammo are; a shotgun that has a short range, spread attack; twin submachine guns that have a long range, spread attack; Molotov cocktails that have a explosion attack that ignites zombies; the sniper rifle has a long range that cuts through all zombies in its singular path; and the flamethrower is a short range, spread weapon, good to use against hordes.
There are also zombie varieties to wonderfully kill; there’s the standard zombie; the puking zombie whose green sick slows you down when walked over; side-stepping zombies who dodge you shots; grapplers whose grasp can’t be broken; grannies who throw knives; and sheriff, who carry short range shotguns.
The set pieces you carry out zombie extinction in are very detailed and very creepy looking, each with respective ways to enjoyable environmental kills, like; in the airport area, zombies can be sucked into a downed commercial plane's working turbine engine; or in the snow covered, timber mill, they can fall into a wood chipper. However there are only seven set pieces, meaning you are going to suffer a lot of repetition if you’re trying to get to level 55.
And that’s the game’s main problem; repetition. Soon, by the middle mark, you will have fought all the zombie varieties in all the set pieces with all the weapons and killed them by all the environment kills. But the mindless fun can make up for that and try not to think about it too much, but it might be better with a soundtrack that gives us the thought of a kick-ass zombie battle, but most of the time the only music is creepy synthesisers or just the zombies moan which can ruin the feeling of being the bad-ass conqueror of zombies.
Zombie Apocalypse is an enjoyable game to play if you’ve gotten bored with Dead Rising or Left 4 Dead or Nazi Zombies, but it suffers from repetition and not much replay value. I would recommend it if it was a little bit cheaper on the Playstation Store but if you have too much disposable income, you’ll get your money’s worth.
I’m Random Internet Critic and I criticise it because all we want to do is eat your brains.
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