Burn Zombie Burn!

Burn Zombie Burn, is without a doubt one of the best downloadable games available on the PSN.

It plays out very much like an arcade game, but one with a surprising amount of lastability.

B-Z-B plays out in a 3rd person perspective but with the view on a slanted birds eye view. You can see your character, humoursly named Bruce for which could be an obvious wink to Bruce Cambell, aswell as most of his surroundings. As you move Bruce the camera will scroll along always keeping up and giving you plenty of the enviroment to witness for any coming zombies.

Not like you'll really need to keep a good eye out for any zombies, theres always dozens to literally fill the screen sometimes there'll so many zombies you'll notice the enviroment itself just slowly be gulped up by the horde of the undead.

So how you go about putting a stop to the undead mass' that roam around your once peaceful little town, is through alot of bullets, explosions and brain sucking contraptions.

B-Z-B like i've already stated, is very old school in its gameplay scheme yet also pretty upto date with more of the recent of the genre.
Your goal varies depending on the mode, but generally your to try and wrack up your score as high as possible to earn yourself medals which in turn unlocks new enviroments and some extra bonus'.
Now to get your score up, is of course involving the massacre of zombies, but you can't just simply equip yourself with a shotgun and blast away, well you can but it won't get you very far.

Like the title suggests, the way to getting a noticable score is to set the undead on fire.
This can start up a times combo with how many on fire timing the score of whatever zombie you kill. When a zombie's through with its flamed bunanza however or if you choose to kill it, your tims combo goes down.
Another note is that while the ''normal'' zombies are rather slow and sluggish, like most zombies, the flaming ones become faster in their chase for your brains.

Flame zombies and standard zombies even drop different powerups, your standard zombies can drop health items and TNT while the flame zombies can drop powerups ''for'' your TNT to give them a bigger radius and even remote contrability and such.
So it goes along way as to when you want to really let loose with the fire. You may first set a whole horde on fire, then killing the other standard zombies to get your score up. But your health is low so you may then decide to simply lay off the fire and keep blasting away till some generous soldier of the undead drops you a hotdog.

That alone gives you a good deal of strategy at hand. Of course theres still the surprising number of toys you can use to set the fires and drop the undead.
Initially Bruce is equipped with a pistol with unlimited ammo and a torch with unlimited...flame? but theres plenty of extras to come across including your usual fare such as shotgun and flamethrower...to some hilariously ingenious weapons such as the brain-sucker, which can suck the brain out of a unlucky zombie then shoot it out to distract any nearby zombies.
Another favourite is the ''dance-gun'' which when shot at a wave of zombies will force them to all engage in a dance not unlike the MJ song Thriller!

A red button is also in the middle of every level, that when you have aquired a number of kills using only one weapon, will have it available to unleash its own unique effect per level. It can vary from having the level rain to put out the fires that may have spread on some of the fences or the zombies themselves, to even a UFO.

Their really is alot of substance to be found here in terms of the weaponry. The zombies too have alot of variety ranging from the usual shambling grunts to even undead ballet dancers and undead american footballers that can charge at you causing a great deal of damage.

The different modes of play aren't all that radically different but do at least give you a different $tyle of play per mode. You have the freeplay, which is the basic mode of trying to survive for as long as you can while of course trying to burn and blast as many zombies as you can.
Theirs timed mode which is fundamentally the same but now with a constantly ticking timer to worry about. Fortunatly killing burning zombies can add a few more seconds fo the clock.
Then theirs ''Protect Daisy'', which has you trying to, surpise surprise, protect Daisy, Bruces blonde n busty girlfriend. She'll be sitting in her care so she acts as almost like a flag your trying to protect, just a flag with boobs.
Again similair to the timed mode, killing flamed zombies can give you items to replenish Daisy's health.

Leaderboards, medals and of course a small number of trophies give you alot to aim for, though its all for the hardcore sort of gamer. Burn zombie burn is certaintly not an easy game, it at least has a helpful tutorial to eleborate on most of the aspects of the game, but that only has you still stuck in a pretty tough game but knowing the controls from your first play through.
Its not overly difficult though just it offers an enjoyable challenge even for the more veteran of these type of high-score games.

The sound of the game is also generally rather good. Of course theirs virtually no story besides a super-cool hunk by the name of Bruce came here to kill zombies...and chew bubblegum. Theirs a few lines of dialogue Bruce will say at the start of each game, their humorous but theres only a select few, theres also no corny one liners during the actual game either sadly which with a guy like Bruce weilding a flamethrower faced by a whole army of the undead, its practically one-liner heaven!
The zombies themselves emit all the usual groans and the like. The sound effects are all strong yet keeping within the sillyness of the game.
The music consists of some hard rock guitaring, its plain yet catchy and bodes well with the games overall atmosphere.

Graphically is rather the same. It has a very springy cartoony look. You'll never really get a close look of much of whats happening besides a close up of Bruce getting himself geared before each level. Bruce at least looks pretty good, almost like a little rubber toy. His oversized jaw and firey shirt all give him an appropatly likable personality.
Even with its cartoony nature, gore is still plenty with every dead zombie leaving behind a lovely lil pool of red.

How long the game can last is like most, upto you. Simply getting a bronze on each level won't last you very long, but really striving for the high scores and gold medals it can last you surprisingly long thanks to its rather high difficulty. Theres a few extras to be had too like character bio's and some concept art.
And with it being £6/11$ it certaintly lives up to the price and even then some.

Fun, addictive and a really good game to grind your gears, its a standing champion of the PSN exclusive downloads, though not really for everyone and possibly a little difficult for just your casual gamer, theres still plenty out there who can agree this game could last you longer than some of the ps3's own exclusives...I'm glaring at you Heavenly Sword!