I’ve hesitated to put up a full review of this game for some time, having purchased it weeks ago, because..

Well, I haven’t put a ton of time into playing it, to be blunt. This isn’t an issue of being rushed though, or even of ordinary laziness. It’s just..

The game just isn’t fun. At all.

Let’s back up. Zombie Apocalypse is an arcade-style semi-isometric perspective shooter, available for the Xbox 360, where you play as one of four intentionally stereotypical Zombie Apocalypse scenario protagonists (a retired soldier, nerd, disgruntled surgeon and bimbo) and mow down hordes of the Differently Animated as they rise from.. everywhere (graves not necessary) and try to devour you, as well as the same woman in the same blue suit who repeatedly requires you to protect her until a helicopter arrives to rescue her (but not you).

Stages include a cemetary, a junkyard, a city center and so forth. Violence is extreme, weapons are plentiful, gore is fairly considerable. In other words, in many respects, just another Anti-Zombie game. However, Zombie Apocalypse is an Anti-Zombie game with a fairly high price tag for Xbox Marketplace (about 10 bucks), and a more prominent than usual pedigree (it was published by Konami).

What’s the problem? Well, the ZRC is of course outraged by the casual and wanton violence against the Differently Animated. Yet again gamers are presented with a zero-sum conflict with the Undead, forced by game logic and convention to slaughter literally hundreds of virtual people who are acting out the worst and most egregious Anti-Zombie stereotypes. But that was more or less a given from a game called ‘Zombie Apocalypse’.

The issue here for me as the designated game reviewer here at the ZRC is that this game isn’t fun. It has a bit more graphical polish than any of the numerous XBLA Zombie defense games I’ve played, but that’s all. Perhaps worse, there are several annoying factors in the gameplay that make it more frustrating than enjoyable. For example, when your character is ‘eaten’ and respawns, the Zombies in the level remain. If a horde had accumulated that was far too large to deal with, you may find yourself doomed to simply be regenerated into their next meal.

The fact that each stage is essentially the same as the last structurally (as opposed to the set decorations) and that Zombies rise from the ground more or less randomly, and that civilians to save appear more or less randomly, makes the whole thing feel like gambling with a computer for no stakes with no reward. You aim with one joystick, move with another, tap the fire button in regular intervals and wait to be randomly overwhelmed and die. Boooooooring.

I was going to give the game a few more hours, but honestly? I’ve played a lot of shooters in my day (and I mean a ton), but Zombie Apocalypse is one of the least rewarding I’ve ever purchased from a major company. To think that Konami, which once turned out sterling classics like Gradius, Lifeforce and Contra, games which were enormously fun as well as socially uplifting (telling the story of a unified human race fighting against monstrous alien invaders) has been reduced to slapping together shooters to cash in on the Anti-Zombie craze? A game where the only point is to kill as many people without pulses as possible, for as long as possible, robotically and repetitively?

It’s just plain sad.

Thus this game from Konami earns our lowest rating, that of Living Supremacist.

Boo.

Tags: Videogames

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, December 13th, 2010 at 6:23 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.