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chuckroI took advantage of the Halloween sale to pay $2 for a collection of zombie-themed games. I wasn’t particularly wild about any of them, but hey, it was two bucks and I got a couple hours of amusement out of trying them all.
I, Zombie - Stealth/puzzle game where you play a zombie and need to infect all the people in the level without getting blown to pieces. There are only 20 levels, so it's a short thing, and some of them are irritatingly hard because you need to run in a careful zig-zag pattern to eat someone who's shooting at you, or you need to time things absolutely perfectly. (You slow down as you're hit, so if the first shot lands and you're not already on top of the guy, you're losing the level.)
Enola - A melding of first-person and adventure puzzle game, with the same sort of problems I had with many of the games from the Nightmares bundle: I don't particularly like the FPS controls, and combining them with point-and-click moon logic puzzles doesn't help. I'm curious about the outcome of this game (it opens with a women who comes home to discover that "Angelica" is missing and that her home has transformed into a bizarre psychedelic landscape), but I don't actually want to play it.
Dead Pixels - Side-scrolling beat-em-up: It's the NES game River City Ransom/, but with zombies. (And also much more emphasis on guns with limited ammo, and less on melee attacks and improvised weapons.) I was turned off by the limited resources but unlimited enemies, and the very repetitive gameplay.
Zombie Killtime - Arena-style side-scrolling endless-wave zombie-shooting game. Clearly designed with multiplayer in mind; the single-player game is short, deadly and not particularly pleasant. (It has permadeath, despite there being a zillion upgrades and weapons to buy.) Also, the graphics are basically bloody squares: heavily pixelated endless zombie hoards. Basically, you need to be very good at the game to get to the point of buying the cool upgrades (or playing with friends where respawning is apparently an option); and presumably by that point you really need them.
Burn Zombie Burn! - Arena-style top-down endless-wave zombie-shooting game. You're a well-greased redneck who kills zombies of all stripes with all the usual weapons. Much more designed for single-player and the casual mode is moderately fun, but it's basically just an endless game of Gauntlet without all of the exploring or escaping to lower levels. (Can I also just state for the record that I don’t really like the WASD-plus-mouse standard controls? They irritate me.)
All Zombies Must Die!: Scorepocalypse - The military, particularly Chuck McJagger, are rescuing civilians from the zombie hordes. This is a more complicated top-down shoot-em-up, with a "home base" and side quests and item crafting and all that jazz. But the control scheme is essentially the same as Burn Zombie Burn, and I'm not super-fond of it. And if you aren't really into the primary gameplay, all the bonus features in the world won't save it.
The Music Machine - Haley, an eccentric 13-year-old girl, has a complicated relationship with her old friend Quintin. He's a ghost now, and he's puppeting her body with the intent of finding a satisfactory way of killing her. This is a first-person exploration game by the same folks as The Moon Sliver (which was in a different bundle that I also bought; and which you should play first, to get certain references). There doesn't seem to be anything that can kill you—except in a very unpleasant area near the end—and the puzzles are relatively benign. (Which doesn't mean that segments don't get freakin' terrifying.) Basically, you're there to take in the atmosphere and unravel the story.
Overall: I’m not that into arcade-style zombie shoot-em-ups / survival games. Now I know.
I, Zombie - Stealth/puzzle game where you play a zombie and need to infect all the people in the level without getting blown to pieces. There are only 20 levels, so it's a short thing, and some of them are irritatingly hard because you need to run in a careful zig-zag pattern to eat someone who's shooting at you, or you need to time things absolutely perfectly. (You slow down as you're hit, so if the first shot lands and you're not already on top of the guy, you're losing the level.)
Enola - A melding of first-person and adventure puzzle game, with the same sort of problems I had with many of the games from the Nightmares bundle: I don't particularly like the FPS controls, and combining them with point-and-click moon logic puzzles doesn't help. I'm curious about the outcome of this game (it opens with a women who comes home to discover that "Angelica" is missing and that her home has transformed into a bizarre psychedelic landscape), but I don't actually want to play it.
Dead Pixels - Side-scrolling beat-em-up: It's the NES game River City Ransom/, but with zombies. (And also much more emphasis on guns with limited ammo, and less on melee attacks and improvised weapons.) I was turned off by the limited resources but unlimited enemies, and the very repetitive gameplay.
Zombie Killtime - Arena-style side-scrolling endless-wave zombie-shooting game. Clearly designed with multiplayer in mind; the single-player game is short, deadly and not particularly pleasant. (It has permadeath, despite there being a zillion upgrades and weapons to buy.) Also, the graphics are basically bloody squares: heavily pixelated endless zombie hoards. Basically, you need to be very good at the game to get to the point of buying the cool upgrades (or playing with friends where respawning is apparently an option); and presumably by that point you really need them.
Burn Zombie Burn! - Arena-style top-down endless-wave zombie-shooting game. You're a well-greased redneck who kills zombies of all stripes with all the usual weapons. Much more designed for single-player and the casual mode is moderately fun, but it's basically just an endless game of Gauntlet without all of the exploring or escaping to lower levels. (Can I also just state for the record that I don’t really like the WASD-plus-mouse standard controls? They irritate me.)
All Zombies Must Die!: Scorepocalypse - The military, particularly Chuck McJagger, are rescuing civilians from the zombie hordes. This is a more complicated top-down shoot-em-up, with a "home base" and side quests and item crafting and all that jazz. But the control scheme is essentially the same as Burn Zombie Burn, and I'm not super-fond of it. And if you aren't really into the primary gameplay, all the bonus features in the world won't save it.
The Music Machine - Haley, an eccentric 13-year-old girl, has a complicated relationship with her old friend Quintin. He's a ghost now, and he's puppeting her body with the intent of finding a satisfactory way of killing her. This is a first-person exploration game by the same folks as The Moon Sliver (which was in a different bundle that I also bought; and which you should play first, to get certain references). There doesn't seem to be anything that can kill you—except in a very unpleasant area near the end—and the puzzles are relatively benign. (Which doesn't mean that segments don't get freakin' terrifying.) Basically, you're there to take in the atmosphere and unravel the story.
Overall: I’m not that into arcade-style zombie shoot-em-ups / survival games. Now I know.
