I was looking through the Xbox Live Marketplace today and saw something insidious – a Zombie game being sold under the Indie Game label for only 80 points, or a dollar in real money.

I decided to investigate, and what I found was shocking.

Ok, not *that* shocking.

As the title suggests, Yet Another Zombie Defense (YAZD from here on out) is a tower defense style game, where you are fending off the zombie hordes in a darkened game universe. It’s just your character huddled around a single streetlamp fighting off a horde of zombile automatons, round after round.

It must be noted that there are several oddities about this game. For one, despite being a lone figure in a zombie apocalypse, your character has access to some sort of vast weapons based economy. After each round, during the day he/she can purchase guns, heavy ordinance and easy to assemble fencing with which to fend off his nemeses. Yet, despite this clear evidence of a functioning society, he/she never leaves their streetlight.

Odd.

The zombie AI behavior is also strange. Zombies will ignore the human player in many instances to attack the pallisades you construct instead. Is this an act of altriusm, so that the next round’s zombies can find an easier path to the human at the center? Is this a sign that the zombies hate pallisades far more than the living?

I have a theory that explains all this. In fact, the player character is an outsider, an invader, a highly trained commando from a mercenary firm, something like Blackwater, here on behalf of the Pallisade-Industrial complex. He has been commissioned to field test the latest innovations in anti-Undead weaponry, and is in fact paid per zombie scalp collected, a shameful practice from our nation’s past brought to new evil life in the 21st century. Your enemies aren’t unfeeling flesh eating monsters, but oppressed Differently Animated resistance fighters, struggling for freedom!

You don’t play the hero in this game, oh no – you play a greedy mass murderer!

*dramatic musical cue*

And to think, this is widely available, on Xbox Live, for so little money. The developers ought to feel a deep sense of shame.

Tags: Review, Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.