Xbox Live Indie Games Trial Impressions - Zombie Mania
The next person who tells you zombies make everything better, smack them in the fucking face.
I've gotten into the indie games on Xbox Live lately, and there are a few damned good ones. This is not one of them. It's a ripoff of Pac-Man. Pretty much the story is you're charged with gathering up the body parts of the villagers or something like that, avoiding zombies all the while. It plays like a slow paced Pac-Man. And I'm not talking Pac-Man Championship Edition. I'm talking the ORIGINAL Pac-Man. You literally go through this maze picking up all the body parts (pellets), avoiding zombies(a less interesting version of Pac-Man's ghosts). Occasionally picking up an axe (ie Power Pellet) to swing at the zombie and tear them into little pieces that, after a while, reassemble themselves and resume going along their merry way.From what I played of the trial, there is no enemy A.I. at all. Now this would be perfectly understandable, because zombies are just mindless animated corpses. But they don't even react to you when you get near them. I followed one of them for most of the level.
The graphics are something that could have been done on PCs in the early to mid 90's. Have you ever played the awesome Sega Genesis game Fatal Labyrinth (which is on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3)? You remember how your character moves in that game? Pretty much like he's got a 2x4 shoved up his ass? That came came out in 1991, and is awesome considering it's age and simplicity. This game does the same thing with the characters. They have almost no animation, no personality, no nothing. They're just there. The same thing with the backgrounds, just sloppy and boring. The sound is just mainly the typical zombie moan, and if you get hit by one of them your character does a yell. The music, however, is pretty good. Though it doesn't fit at all. It's just a very slight, almost unnoticeable creepy piano music.
The gameplay, I described in the opening. It's basically a slow, boring version of Pac-Man. Now I will say this for it, the control is surprisingly good. Your character turns when you want him to ... but that's about it. The challenge is nil. Considering the zombies just wander around like you're not even there, you'll breeze through the trial.
What's worse about this game, it's 400 fucking points! It's not worth it in my opinion. It's crap, and it's way overpriced. If it was the minimum 80 points ... MAYBE. But I'd have to be REALLY bored and REALLY drunk. Just a poor excuse for a game that you shouldn't even bother with.
Now ... maybe it does get more interesting in the later levels. But the trial has told me that I'm not going to shell out the 5 bucks to find out. It's either this, or a pack of cigarettes. I am going to choose the cigarettes and delete this fucker off my hard drive.
Check out what other people think of it at XBLARatings.
Possibly related posts:
August 12th, 2009 - 10:49
Thanks for the impressions. I’ll not be bothering to download this one.
August 12th, 2009 - 12:13
@Jigsaw hc
I wish to god I hadn’t. Fucking terrible.