Atom Zombie Smasher Review
Review - posted by Trash on Wed 13 July 2011, 07:31:29
It's countless zombies (or zeds as the game calls them) against you, your mercenaries and your nuclear powered orbital battle station. And yes, that means that the old Vietnam war quote 'we had to destroy the town to save it' is the key gameplay element. Well, that and having choppers swoop down to rescue as many people as you can from the ravenous horde. It's all very Apocalypse Now meets the fall of Saigon with quite some oddball narrative comic style sequences thrown in for good measure.
Blendo Games from Flotilla and Gravity Bone fame have put their sights towards the ever popular zombie apocalypse genre and made it into a top-down puzzler slash strategy game with a campaign map showing the progress of those stumbling braineaters over the fictional city of Nuevos Aires and battle maps in which you either have to clear up the zed menace or try and save a certain amount of people within a set time limit.
Take this simple concept and add stuff like exploding gaslines, enormous zeds that crush buildings, very close timelimits, research options for your gizmos, mercenary squads and equipment that range from snipers to assault troops to zed lures that get assigned randomly and you've got a game never seems to get predictable. Not to mention that it is hard. Very hard. A typical mission has you try and get a set number of survivors out by chopper in something like a two minute time limit. If you kill all the zeds or save enough civilians the mission ends. If not, nighttime begins and zeds stream in from every corner of the map. Good luck saving the last handfull of survivors with this bearing down on them. And if you lose to the zeds it means the territory becomes infected and starts to spread the plague to all the regions around it. Meaning you have to run an extermination mission just to clean it out, but by then the areas around it are doomed as well. Seeing the campaign map turn zed pink in no time is pretty much a given.
Zed pink, you ask? Yup, zeds are represented as little pink dots that shuffle ominously towards the yellow dot survivors. It all looks rather clinical untill you start to call in artillery strikes, buildings begin to collapse, gaslines explode and that number of yellow dots starts to decrease alarmingly. Not to mention that as soon as a purple zed gets hold of a frightened yellow survivor it turns instantly into another purple dot. Seeing the infection spread nearly instantly through a large group of survivors becomes something you'll learn to dread, making sure you'll rather nuke an entire street from orbit than let that single purple dot wander around.
In a typical mission you randomly get several mercenaries and gizmos to make your life easier. It could range from some snipers that take out zombies over a long range, some barriers to try and block off areas or make the zeds travel in a certain path or mines to blow them up to heavy artillery emplacements for mass carnage. The fact that these are assigned randomly means you can't pick out a favourite combo and focus on these but instead have to learn to work with what you have to stop the shuffling menace. Seeing how limited your means usually are this means that trying to reach your goal in a mission is quite the puzzle. Not to mention that the game has absolutely no qualms in throwing seemingly impossible combinations at you. Getting a mission in which you just have to rain death down from your orbital battle station then becomes a nice little stress reliever.
Talking about raining down death. Apart from the clinical way zeds and survivors are represented the graphics look rather nice. Explosions, clouds of gas, collapsing buildings, falling rain, splattered zeds and even birds flying over all look crisp and clean. The sound effects are also top notch with screams, gunfire and explosions rattling off constantly. I especially loved the sirens as the helicopter is about to land though that might be a bit Pavlovian. The presentation is clear and concise and the game has a rather extensive encyclopedia that apart from a buttload of nonsense also does a good deal in helping you get used to the game.
Swarm season makes for a target rich environment.
Blendo Games have done one thing that makes for a good indie and timewaster. Take a simple concept and turn it into an addictive, challenging and fun gaming experience. The game constantly manages to keep you at the edge of your seat as you'll try to get that last few survivors out while the clock ticks down and the zed's come nearer to taking over Nuevos Aires. Give the demo a try and if you enjoy the (admittedly extremely) short look it gives you into the game do get it. The little yellow dots need you.
