On the 5th of May, Popcap games have decided to turn their gigantic casual game making machine around and release a family friendly game about Zombies.
What? Family Friendly?
It’s called Plants VS Zombies and looks incredibly cutesy, funny and from the makers of Bejeweled and Peggle - I am willing to bet that its going to be really Fun!
You play the plants in a tower defense type game, where you protect the innocent people in the house from the cute swarming hordes of the differently alive. To facilitate this guardianship you build different types of plants to to stop the zombies, each with different abilities and strengths and weaknesses against the different types of zombies.
I’ve already pre-ordered a copy, through steam, so we should have a full review up when the game releases.
You can check out some of the screen shots of the game from the steam site.
It’s unsurprising that the iPhone has a plethora of zombie related stuff (wallpapers, ring-tones and applications) since we all know the the humble zombie has driven the progress of media technology for generations.
However, I didn’t actually expect any of the iPhone zombie games to be actually good, and it seems that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
I have now purchased and played all of the Zombie games on the iPhone (or, at least the ones with ‘zombie’ somewhere in the title) and I am ready to give my opinions of them; starting with the one I play/get angry at the most… Zombieville USA.
You are a dude, a human survivor presumably - passing from left to right through a level. Zombies spawn from off the screen, and pop up from the ground to harass your progress.
You shoot them with whatever gun you currently have equipped, and pick up some cash for doing so.
Along the way you can also loot empty houses by spending some time inside them, they usually relinquish cash or ammo.
When you have reached the end of the level, you enter a safe zone, allowing you to spend your hard earned cash on bigger and better guns to defeat the zombie menace and try to pass as many levels as possible.
The Meat
I love the look and minimal feel of this game, its very cool and funky - plus the touchscreen controls make the game very simple to pick up and play. The game does include a little video tutorial - so you can check that you haven’t missed anything, but you probably wont need it.
I also love the choice of weapons which was put into the game: shotguns, chain-guns, chainsaws, flamethrowers and lasers oh my! It’s like some sort of zombie killing heaven.
The zombies look cool and funky and die in very satisfying ways, plus, as you progress you get to see some different types of zombies (like the fast white zombie, or the hardy red-eyed zombie) and kill them.
The Bones
Every so often the game does slowdown for no real reason that I can determine. It’s not because of the number of zombie creatures on screen… and it doesn’t happen often - but when it does you will be chewed on. That’s irritating.
The game has no save. I understand the point of the game is to see how far (level wise) you can get without dying, but I would have loved to see some sort of save so you can get past the beginning levels and get right to the meat/fun of the game - the weapons near the end. It’s a small nag, but it’s there. It does have a resume function - which starts the game from the beginning of whatever level you were up to.
The game comes with music, but its repetitive and gets irritating after a while. It would have been real nice to allow the player to use the built in iPod and supply their own music.
The Taste
This is currently my “go to game” on my iPhone, it’s fun, quick to get into (when you are waiting for a bus, or whatever) so I suggest you give it a go.
The full game is also very cheap - at $1.19 for this kind of quality entertainment? Snap it up quick.
You can buy the full version here, but there is also a free light version - if you want to try it out.
LOLcatsarenotnew - and, surprisingly to me, neither was inevitable derivation of captioning Zombies from our favorite movies.
You can see a bunch of excellent LOLZombies here at http://lolzombie.livejournal.com.
So, in order to jump up and down of this bandwagon of funny - we have put together a couple of LOLGhouls - taken from stills of the public domain Night of the Living Dead!
We found the stills at the excellent Dead Source fan site.
