Giant Bomb Review
37 CommentsZombie Apocalypse Review
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by Jeff Gerstmann on
Zombie Apocalypse brings dual-joystick shooting and zombies together in a really unimaginative way.
The one thing that sets Zombie Apocalypse apart from the pack of other dual-joystick games out there is that it can be played by four players simultaneously over the Internet. You don't get that sort of multiplayer out of most downloadable games of this sort, but it only goes so far. The game itself has you pick one of four characters, and then you must survive by blasting your way through wave after wave of zombies. The first few waves only have regular zombies, which will grab you if they can, but you can usually shake them off by rattling the joysticks around a bit. Later waves introduce more dangerous opponents, including (but not limited to) big guys that fall on you immediately without giving you time to struggle, zombies armed with throwing knives, others with shotguns, and still others with explosives. The exploding zombies, which burst after one shot, are especially annoying, because the game's camera angle doesn't always make it easy to judge the distance between you and your target... leading to plenty of cases where you shoot an exploding zombie only to go down with it. Judging distance makes the projectile zombies a bit trickier than they should be, too.
By default, you're armed with a standard rifle that has a good rate of fire and does a decent amount of damage. Weapon power-ups appear with regularity, giving you access to shotguns, flamethrowers, molotov cocktails, a chaingun, a rifle that shoots through multiple targets, and so on. You'll also occasionally get the chance to rescue a survivor, which gives you a teddy bear filled with explosives that, when tossed, draws the attention of nearby zombies. You also have a chainsaw that you can use to clear things out when the horde gets too close, but you're usually fine with your projectile weapons.
Other than being very cookie-cutter, both in gameplay and in subject matter, the way it cycles through a handful of level designs makes the game look really repetitive, and the game never really feels like it requires much skill. Most deaths seem to come from not noticing a zombie that spawned behind you, or by misjudging the distance on an exploding zombie, but since death doesn't matter much, the game feels like a real drag. Zombies will often spawn all around you, but you have to wait for them to complete their crawling out of the ground animation before your attacks register, which is also a little annoying.
Zombie Apocalypse is a boring dual-joystick shooter that lacks the speed and intensity that the best games in the genre all share. Throw in a generic zombie theme and you're left with something that feels like it'd be a neat free Left 4 Dead mod. As a standalone commercial product, though, it's lacking at every turn.
