Developer: gamedoctors
Publisher: gamedoctors
Zombies are usually good for a beating, or a shooting, crushing, flaying, chopping, blasting, exploding or disintegrating. With Zombie Smash, you can do quite a lot of the above. And since we at StartGame have a bit of a softspot for both Zombies and Zombie Killin’, we jump at the chance to play a good zombie game.
The premise here is that you are holed up in your house on a remote farm, a survivor of some kind of zombie holocaust, and, surprise surprise, zombies want to eat your brains, and they want to eat them NOW!
Gameplay takes the form of a pretty bog-standard fling-’em-up-’em-up stronghold defence simulator. You “grab” zombies with your finger and throw them about in all directions until they die. Again. You can use your thumbs to grab up to 2 zombs simultaneously, and this will come in handy when you’ve got the walking undead bearing down on your house in seemingly endless waves. Chuck, smash, crash and fling your opponents all around to crush their bodies and earn you stars, which can be used to upgrade and purchase items in the store.
Further to the flinging, you can use various items to make a squelchy mess, such as boulders, landmines, handguns and even, get this: a wrecking ball! They all help when you’ve got the necrotic reanimates knocking at your farmhouse door.
There’s 31 missions in Campaign mode, an Endless mode and a Sandbox mode (where you control items, and zombie waves), so replayability is there, but you’ll want to replay it over and over again, because it’s so fun. The sandbox and endless modes will become more fun as you progress through Campaign, so it’s probably your best bet to play that through before you have your wicked way.
Having said, it’s deceptively difficult, as the waves become thick and fast, and with multiple zombie types you can end up getting confused easily if they’re coming from both sides. Some of them carry pistols, and with your fingers blocking your view you may find yourself losing quite a lot, unless you have a decent stock of decent items (a giant breeze block is good for clearing out those perilously close to the front door).
A criticism of it would have to be the shooting mechanic: it’s a bit naff to be honest and doesn’t work too well, demanding a high accuracy level that’s not all too possible when you have dainty little sausages for fingers. What you do is place your finger at the window of the house and adjust the angle in order to shoot zombies in the head. The pity is that the shoot line is too fiddly, and killing a lot of zombies is hard because you will find that most hits won’t do too much damage, and it becomes a frustrating experience.
It can also get a bit tedious after a while, becoming a chore doing the same level over and over again if you keep failing. There is a score incentive to do well and not let any of them get near your house, it’s just a pity when the handgun-wielding ones show up, you don’t realise and suddenly you have no house left.
Overall though, it’s a pretty solid game, by no means perfect and can be a bit tedious, but it’s bags of fun to splat zombies all over the place. And it’s relatively cheap, so you won’t be losing out on too much money on this.
