The Haunted Hoard: Zombie Wranglers (Xbox 360)

There’s something strange in the neighborhood, but you don’t normally call the Ghostbusters when there are zombies skulking about suburbia. The Zombie Wranglers are more suited for the job, and while a squad of kids might not feel the best line of defense against a zombie invasion, they prove to be fairly competent protectors of their home town of Potter’s Field.

 

Zombie Wranglers is a third-person shooter where up to four players can work together to fight through twenty zombie-filled levels or you can play online to compete to be the better zombie catcher, but the important thing to note is that “wrangling” isn’t just a colorful term here. The four playable characters, Uju, Monica, Dean, and Amy, all come equipped with two ways to deal with the walking dead. Firing upon them with whatever slow projectile weapon your particular character relies on will kill them, but the rewards for it are weaker. Wrangling them is where the money is made, and with cash important for high scores and buying power-ups, it’s technically better to wrangle than to just blast away everything in your path. Wrangling will require your character to stand in place while their weapon tries to suck in the nearby undead, but while it will prevent the zombies caught in the vortex from attacking you, other zombies are free to interrupt with their attacks. You can give zombies a smack to briefly stun them though, and perhaps too quickly you will probably realize that wrangling in a lot of situations boils down to simply battering the zombies so they’re reeling and then vacuuming them up.

Making the general wrangling easy isn’t a problem per se, and the game recognizes that it would probably be dull if this process was always straightforward. Zombies will pretty much always appear shortly after the previous ones have been dealt with and they come in gradually larger groups where finding enough downtime between stunning and sucking them up becomes harder to manage. Some levels craft goals like trying to rescue people trapped by the zombies in a set amount of time so you have to figure out faster ways to wrangle your prey, but on the other hand the game also concocts some incredibly basic and boring survival stages where running in circles can often prevent the unintelligent zombies from ever threatening you until the timer runs out. Most stages do provide you with a Chore List though that mostly consists of taking out zombies of a specific type and harder levels start to demand more difficult zombie variants, but the new zombie types the game rolls out unfortunately lean towards tedious and annoying rather than compelling shifts in difficulty.

 

Some of the first new zombies you’ll learn to loathe are the trash can zombies and Renaissance fair zombies. Both of them come equipped with armor you need to whittle down before they can be killed or wrangled, the two main ways to do so being with melee blows or your regular fire. Problem is, both are designed to break out of a stun after taking a certain amount of damage and they’ll raise their shield, making them invulnerable for a period. If you are trying to clear out these specific zombie types you’ll often find yourself bashing them about to wear them down, waiting unable to do anything as they block, and then repeating the process as you hope no other zombies crop up to annoy you during the process. Zombies disappear if you stray too far so you can’t try to lure them away either, so wearing down these tougher zombies really does feel like a chore. Barfing zombies will make your kid barf which takes time to resolve, just like when you get knocked down it can feel like you’re off your feet for far too long. On the other hand, the Franken zombies that start first as bosses before cropping up more regularly feel more intelligently designed. They’ll have shorter periods where they can’t be hurt, they do an attack that knocks over other zombies but also leaves the Franken stunned for a bit, and if you get in close to hit them you can stun them between attacks too. A Franken is a proper threat but one where you remain active when facing it, and perhaps more importantly than other details, it is far friendlier when it comes to wrangling detection than even standard zombies.

 

Wrangling and even firing your weapon normally in Zombie Wranglers is a lot messier than it should be considering they’re both vital options for success. Even when you point right in front of yourself at a zombie, you can’t guarantee that it will be properly handled by your weapon. Sometimes the wrangling beam will snag zombies behind instead or even just grab nothing at all. With group management important to keeping zombies at bay, having the game try to wrangle the wrong zombies despite you pointing at exactly the ones you want can interfere with strategy, and things only seem worse when you fire your weapon. Sometimes your character seems to have a mind of their own on which zombie to aim for, the degree of automatic aiming pulling your weapon away from where you’re actually looking at times as Zombie Wranglers detects something it would rather have you shoot instead. These problems persist throughout the whole adventure and hamper some of the areas where the game could have allowed for some tactical play. Each kid has a unique weapon so you could have tried to use your abilities to manage the crowd. For example Monica can freeze them with her basic shot, the game not spawning reinforcements while the frozen zombies are still in play. The ectoplasm you earn from killing zombies also builds up into Zombombs you can unleash, and for a character like Uju you can make them dance in place for easy pickings or Dean’s bomb can go for a simple repelling blast if you do find yourself surrounded. Being surrounded by a group of zombies with no real way out can be a common problem if the game misjudges where you’re aiming, and while it can be argued co-op is meant to relieve this pressure, it can still feel like the game getting sloppy especially when there are true outright glitches like Franken being able to slam you through a barrier wall so you tumble endlessly into the void, requiring a level restart to fix.

There are a few ways to help you against the zombie horde, pick-ups important to survival and sometimes bailing you out. Levels start to get free respawning chicken legs you can grab for free health as you need, so sometimes just fighting beside them or running circles to keep grabbing them as they reappear feels like your only option. There are stronger heals where you spend money to get fully topped off, but they also bring up an unusual element of Zombie Wranglers. While money is the main thing you’re gathering, there doesn’t seem to be a cap to how long you can spend accruing it. 100 dollars is awarded for killing a zombie with your weapon’s fire while wrangling them earns 200 per zombie, but wrangling multiple zombies in a row without getting hurt or using other attacks will start to increase the income. However, since zombies keep coming until you complete the Chore List, money scarcity isn’t much of a thing outside of the few boss battles or timed levels. If you want a lot of cash, just spend longer killing zombies and you’ll get there, but this can at least help break the mental barrier on using the power-ups. Levels have specific spots where you can pay for items, some simple like a speed boost or temporary invincibility while others have an impact on the zombies like glue sticking nearby ones in place for a while or the shrinking power turning nearby zombies into tiny little bobble-headed undead who can’t fight so they try to flee. While nice options to have, it feels like they are mostly useful in cramped parts of the game’s outdoor suburban neighborhood levels and the relief is brief no matter which one you grab.

 

Zombie Wranglers throws in some optional collectibles like hidden voodoo dolls and tarot cards so you’ll want to scour levels and smash trash cans looking for them if you want to earn an achievement, the same applying to zombies wearing merch of the game’s developer Frozen Codebase. It’s not a particularly grand hunt though and most can be found just by searching the perimeter of levels and it is something you can do in most stages once the zombies are gone so there’s not much pressure there either. Considering that later zombies can reach out of the trash cans and mailboxes to hold you in place for their brethren, you’re almost encouraged not to really look around until after the danger has passed. Some levels have active creatures like squirrels during the stage though that are persistent nuisances who lock you in place, Zombie Wranglers once more adding a way of upping the difficulty not through a new interactive challenge but some new nuisance aimed to slow you down or limit your options for a spell.

THE VERDICT: Zombie Wranglers provides some interesting powers to its four playable characters that could have made it an enjoyable co-op romp, but most every tool at your disposal is prone to detection issues or the game having a mind of its own on how to direct your attacks. Couple this with many zombies and hazards that are troublesome because they’re slow to kill or keep interrupting you, and it’s hard to appreciate nifty power-ups or boss monsters like Franken that feel like they have more thought put into them. With few goals of interest and a pretty weak approach to extra incentives since money flows so freely and collectibles can be found after levels are cleared, Zombie Wranglers fails to provide proper motivation on top of frequently contending with the game’s rough fundamentals.

 

And so, I give Zombie Wranglers for Xbox 360…

A TERRIBLE rating. A catchy but simplistic song played during the credits is the best Zombie Wranglers has to offer, most everything suffering thanks to foundational flaws in the ways you actually fight against the zombies. While more time was spent dressing up zombies as skaters and construction workers instead of setting them apart in terms of how they fight, Zombie Wranglers would move at a more agreeable speed if your weapons worked as described so you could manage the crowds like you’re trying to do. The unique Zombombs and character weapons do have room for preferences and cooperative tactics, but since they’re unreliable it’s most likely going to be just players shooting zombies and sucking them up without much thought unless they’re playing the agonizing waiting game with armored variants. The survival challenges really show that the biggest issue probably was the designers not thinking through the mechanics they’re implementing since they can’t whip up enough danger to make those levels tough and they decide making fights slow is the main way to make zombies more difficult.

 

Zombie Wranglers has a very loose hold on what it wants to be and that ends up coming back to bite them. Cooperative play can only blind players to the monotony of their own actions so long, and when the increase in difficulty comes as an increase in repetitiveness, it’s even easier for players to spot the shaky ground the game’s built on. Detection issues are too rampant to let the player simply settle into mindless carnage as it keeps pulling their attention towards flaws in the systems they rely on. Zombie Wranglers just keeps hindering the player intentionally or otherwise, so perhaps before Frozen Codebase has zombies wandering around in clothes that make you aware who developed the game, they should have made sure it was one they’d be proud to be associated with first.