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Review

May cause indigestion

by J Nash (November 4th, 2010 at 1:39 am) WITH SPECIAL GUEST STARS

Game: Zombies Ate My Baby. Publisher: Eccentricity. Authors: Piotr Watrucki and Jakub Traczyk (design and code), Blazej Kurkowski (graphics), Treetone feat Krzysztof Olos (sound). Price: 59p/€0,79/99¢. Supports Openfeint. Buy the game or play the demo.

I’m really not sure about this one. At first blush, Zombies Ate My Baby is brill, a centre defence tap shooter with imaginative flourishes like shopping trolley zombs and chapter-loot comics where each ish introduces a new boyf who’s immediately killed. You’ll blast away for quite a while, thoroughly entertained by the pile-up of arcadey chaos as machine-gunned zombs briefly remain slumped in the melee.

Then you start noticing things.

Inexplicably for a high-score game, each level is entirely separate from the others, even if you’re playing on from the last. (There are 16 levels, each of 20 increasingly manic waves as a single continuous barney. A level takes about three minutes to play if you make it to the end.) Beat a location and your score resets. There’s no tangible point to playing the Story mode through rather than dipping in and out.

(To be fair, each level once beaten is unlocked in an escalatingly bonkers Endless mode.)

Your secondary weapon is context-sensitive: usually you tap on or near a zomb to fire your gun at that range, but can prod the bottom left corner to lob a grenade at the spot instead. If zombs reach the centre, ie you, the grenade changes to a sword that insta-kills everything within reach but has a long cooldown. Inevitably you end up with one when you want the other, and as grenades have a minimum lob distance you can too easily fall behind in clearing the waves and become swamped.

(To be fair 2, it’s possible to fight your way excitingly back from a pile-on, but that’s much rarer than tripping over a grenade/sword miscue.)

You can auto-fire by holding down and swiping instead of tapping, but the game becomes confused if you then switch direction with a second finger — you flip to the new angle, but your gun cuts out. This is possibly deliberate so you don’t instantly lose your multi-hit combos, but is stupidly aggravating because you’re defenceless until you tap again.

(To be fair 3, I play by thundering taps over the arena with no auto-fire at all, but even then I’ve been caught by the game thinking I’ve swiped so I spin and unleash a volley of hot nothing.)

The game randomly scatters pick-ups depending on the level (eg, a location only contains certain guns) and wave (eg, health tends to vanish for the last few rounds) and you nab them with a straight tap, but there’s a distinct feeling this is abused for cheap thrills. For example, level 9 has no ammo beyond your initial (insufficient) bandolier; the trick is to let zombs maul you and rely on the medikit spawns to roll you through so you have enough bullets for the climactic rushes. THIS IS NOT A PUZZLE GAME.

There are also a couple of fiddly bugs. Beardy-weirdily, the achievements repeat and the tallies carry over between levels. For instance, if you fire 999 bullets, you’re awarded a “Rambo” trophy. You can only win a single copy for your cabinet, but something’s gone wrong backstage and for every 999 bullets fired, or 499 zombs killed, or whatever, the game flashes the triumph over the screen again. (By chance this is slightly helpful, because you get a half-second breather.)

I’ve been trying hard to escape the trough all evening and to recapture the initial glee of playing Zombies Ate My Baby, the game with witty comics and its own miniature theme song, but it’s really not helping itself. I’m currently stuck on level 10 (where you start with a valuable minigun and are effectively scuppered if any of your taps brush a weaker gun spawn, ie all of them — THIS IS STILL NOT A PUZZLE GAME) and can see from the score summary that I’ve still to meet at least one new zomb and find at least one new gun, but the fun’s gone, baby, gone.

Judge this