REVIEW: Atom Zombie Smasher
I’ve just played through the “casual gameplay” mode on Blendo Games’ Zombie Atom Smasher. I am grinning, and cheering, and feel like I have kept the world safe from the zombie menace. I’m not even going to try and hide it: I fucking love this game.
Now, I’m not a very active gamer. I play Guitar Hero once every couple weeks (and I’m not bad I must say), but the most recent system I have is a PS2, and even that was given to me as a gift (along with the Guitar Hero games and peripherals). I don’t really spend money on games, unless it’s $.99 here and there for an iPhone app. But recently I’ve been wanting to play a good zombie video game, and it seemed, besides Resident Evil, there are few indeed for the PS2. So, tired of trying to find good zombie ROM emulators — Zombies Ate My Neighbors for the Super Nintendo was only fun for a while — I bit the bullet and fired up my Steam account.
Lo, right there on front was an advertisement for Zombie Atom Smasher. I clicked. I read the reviews. I paid $9.99, and I downloaded (incidentally, the game is about 60mb, and doesn’t require anything too fancy to run). Now ten dollars is a little steep for me, but that’s how badly my craving for zombie video game goodness was. So imagine my horror when, upon installation, immediately it didn’t work. It loaded just fine, but the game was very laggy; the screen would only move once every four seconds or so. Frustrated and worried that I had blown ten bucks on a piece of shit, I went to the Blendo Games website, found my issue immediately, did a minor fix, and bada-bang-boom it worked like a charm. I was ready to obliterate some hordes of zeds.
Not only did it function like a charm, but nearly every aspect of this game is charming. The storyline is a basic “zombies are overrunning the world, we must stop them,” but set in a kind of, slightly steampunk alternate universe. It oozes creativity and fun. The sounds are crisp, the graphics vivid. Gameplay itself is something like an old Grand Theft Auto game, with that overhead-looking-down view. You place various kinds of soldiers, blockades, explosives, etc, on your map, as well as your rescue helicopter. You try to rescue the civilians while at the same time trying to block and fight back the zeds (they only call them zeds in the game). The more levels you play, the more experience you get, and, of course, the more you level up. For each new level you reach, you have skill points you can put towards improving your forces. As the game progresses you get different kinds of zeds thrown at you, and different kinds of missions, which require different kinds of strategies (e.g., in some levels there’s no rescue helicopter, you just put down zeds).
As you continue to play, there’s little “vignettes;” basically a cut-scene showing comic book-like panels telling a story. These are fun, and never long, and watching them is completely optional to streamline sending zeds to oblivion, if you want. But they do add more personality and depth to an already highly entertaining game.
I found myself thinking “just one more level, then I’ll turn in..” And when you begin thinking that, you know you’ve hit upon something with enormous entertainment value. At a minute to five minutes, the levels are just short enough, and just challenging enough, and just damn fun enough, that they really facilitate the “just one more level” mindset. I think it took me about an hour and a half to complete the game on casual gaming mode, but it’s difficult to say since it seemed time just flew by. It’s addicting.
There’s a few other aspects to the game, but I’ve covered all the major bases here. Like I said, I love this game, and, honestly, want to play it again, right now! The price is right, the entertainment value is explosive, and, though I haven’t yet, I would imagine the replay value is very high, if anything just because I want to see what other achievements I can unlock and see if I can handle a harder gaming mode. When I review something, I never give it a full 10/10, because that would mean perfection. But other than the glitch at initial installation (which was quickly remedied), I really can’t think of anything bad to say about Atom Zombie Smasher. I have no choice but to give it 10/10 zeds, and I’m looking forward to other games by Blendo, zombie-related or not.
You can find out more about Atom Zombie Smasher at Blendo Games
