Picking Up Steam: Atom Zombie Smasher (PC)

In 2011, I finally downloaded the PC gaming platform Steam primarily because I had heard Team Fortress 2 was going free to play and I wanted to try it out. There was another factor around the same time though that would have inexorably drawn me towards using the service though, and that was the rise of Humble Indie Bundles. These collections of indie games for incredibly low prices were hard to resist, and with the third one being the first I picked up, among the included games was a strategy game called Atom Zombie Smasher. I did end up playing the game… for 30 minutes, before setting it aside and not returning to it until now. To kick off this effort to clear my enormous and ever-growing Steam backlog, I decided it was about time to go back and give one of the first games I ever played through the service a fair shake finally.

 

Atom Zombie Smasher takes place in an alternate version of Earth that seemed to develop advanced technologies much more quickly than we did. In a world that already has robots and orbital weapons by the 1960s, a zombie threat has emerged and started to reach the point it can wipe out entire cities in short order by infecting humans and turning them into the living dead. To take on these Zeds you are appointed as an eye in the sky to order the placement and operation of what limited mercenaries and weapons are available, but if you try to understand the game’s story beyond this, things start to get unusual and vague. The game takes place somewhere called Neuvo Aires and there are a few recurring faces such as the people who helped technology take such huge leaps ahead in this point in history, but you’ll only get strange vignettes by way of comic panels to give you details and some of them aren’t very relevant or important. You’re just as likely to learn about a guy who shaved half of his cat’s fur to help it manage its temperature as you are details on a dire situation involving principle characters, but it does seem the plot is primarily there for conjuring ridiculous scenarios like a man attaching gatling guns that are constantly firing to his iron lung.

 

Atom Zombie Smasher doesn’t really need a plot, the game designed more to be a replayable contest to try and push back enough of the Zed menace to claim victory. Play in Atom Zombie Smasher starts with an overview of an area map, the player seeing whatever new areas have been populated with Zed and the degree to which they have done so. A Level 1 infection is pretty easy to turn back, but 2 and 3 get more difficult while 4 not only represents total Zed saturation, but nearby areas will also start to get infected. Each turn on the map there will be new, previously empty zones filled with at least one new zombie infestation, the player needing to pick which one to tackle that round. Initially it’s not too important which one to strike in regards to which part of the city is infected, but the Level 4 infections and weapons you can use on the map screen later can impact more than one territory, leading to a bit more strategy entering the picture in the late game when choosing where to strike.

The main form of play arises once you’ve chosen the area you will try to save. You’ll view a somewhat randomly generated section of a city filled with innocent civilians in need of rescue. Represented by yellow dots, they can only travel through streets or cross open lots, but this is also true of the Zed who will soon be entering the city from the sides to try and infect everyone. It’s up to you to try and save as many people as you can, the main means of doing so being a rescue helicopter that has a few limits like how many people it can carry at one time, how long it takes to arrive and leave, and naturally it needs a landing zone free of any Zed that would put it at risk. You will have other tools available as they’re gradually unlocked, unfortunately in a random order. Having some attacking mercenaries like Infantry or Snipers can help you wipe out zombies, and while their numbers are very high even in the Level 1 zones, with a good set of attacking mercenaries it is possible to kill every Zed and as a result rescue every citizen in that city. However, early on you could also get weaker tools, like mines where you can only place a few, dynamite you can only detonate once, or barriers that do no true damage.

 

Rolling with the punches and trying to make the random set-ups work is part of the game’s replayability though. You won’t know the area shape or which weapons you have when starting a new run, and even once you’ve unlocked useful mercenaries, each round will see some become unavailable as they’re busy with “away missions”. Similarly, each new day also leads to some extra condition, some of these beneficial like the escape helicopter moving faster but others are detrimental where the zombies are the faster ones instead. Atom Zombie Smasher is a game very prone to snowballing though, especially since your troops and weapons are leveled up through use. Get an Infantry unit early and they can be made into a beastly asset that can easily take down groups of zombies. Upgrade the artillery cannon that you get to fire manually to reload faster and fire more often and you can rain hellfire down on the undead fairly regularly. On the other hand, even getting the artillery early can be messy when it’s slow, giving the zombies a few rounds where you technically might win and save enough humans to declare the missions a success, but the long term gains the zombies make through the battle end up mattering more.

 

The snowballing effect primarily ties to the metric of victory, each of the game’s rounds ending with points being totaled for both sides. Zombies get points for infecting people, you get points for saving people, but there are also territory points. Each Zed controlled territory earns them points proportional to the infection level, but you also get points for any territories you control. However, unless you wipe out all zombies in the area, clearing a level usually leaves it vacant rather than in your control, providing points to no one. Even levels with somewhat manageable layouts can end up being rough because of the level time limit, after which night time begins and the area you’re working in will be swarmed with Zed from all sides that usually serves as a way of rushing the battle to its conclusion. Points do end up mattering as more than a means of victory too, both sides able to unlock new aid by hitting score benchmarks. This will include things like unlocking the ability to research more advanced upgrades for you, but for the Zed it can add occasional enormous zombies to the horde that are much harder to kill.

Looking at the perks of doing well early though, you can see the snowball effect working in either direction. Sometimes you will be scrounging for ground against the zombie menace if the first few mercenaries you unlock aren’t the best, other times you get that early boost and can help hold the Zed back from getting their point bonuses for quite a while. There is definitely a good deal of room in between though for closer contests, but despite there being a few considerations in play, there are actually very few unique units for you to use in the civilian rescue portions. This means the bulk of your playtime will involve a limited range of strategies, especially since you’re not picking your own units nor do you have foreknowledge of a location’s design so you can’t do something like bring the barriers and dynamite with a game plan and instead need to just hope they’re a good fit.

 

However, Atom Zombie Smasher does have a good range of options you can select when starting a new campaign. You can make the amount of victory points required to win as large or small as you like, you can pick Casual mode to make Zed slower and days longer while Hardcore is the opposite, but the real interesting ones are the rule alterations. Combatant will guarantee you always have an attacking unit which can prevent rough slow starts, Chooser outright lets you pick which of the mercenaries or weapons you’ve unlocked that run join you in the next fight, and Triplets even lets you carry up to three iterations of a unit type. You can also add some to make things tougher, Alt. Spawning for example making zombies appear from unexpected points in the city, but these modifications are fairly good at letting you better cater your experience if you do get burned out on unlucky runs or simply want to try a new challenge.

 

Another nice little addition comes in the form of Kringle Jammer. Shifting away from the real-time strategy play where you place weapons or guide infantry to try and win, Kringle Jammer has given your helicopter some guns and lets you fly above the city shooting down the Zed for a change. Civilian protection is still the end goal, but the game takes on a more arcade inspired format as you now clear waves of undead and need to do so quickly enough to beat the timer but also must have some surviving humans below to keep playing. Even just one living human will allow you to keep playing this mode, but each new wave of zombies becomes a bit tougher to clear, especially once the large zombies join the picture. You can pick up bombs to wipe out large groups here too, this mode not too complicated either but working as a nice diversion or a way to let off some steam if you find yourself too often getting overwhelmed by the Zed over in the main game.

THE VERDICT: While this strategy game has the chance to snowball either for you or against you, Atom Zombie Smasher usually has a good enough build-up period in most runs where there are some close calls and satisfying victories to keep the game entertaining albeit prone to huge swings in the balance. The modifiers do help the player better find how they want to play, although the limited range of units does mean the actual rescue missions do start to blur together as they can only be so different within this game’s limited mix of variables.

 

And so, I give Atom Zombie Smasher for PC…

An OKAY rating. I have a hunch that back in 2011 when I gave the game a shot, I started playing, got some poor units off the bat, and thought things looked too hopeless to continue and left the game behind. Atom Zombie Smasher won’t offer the modifications until your second attempt at a campaign nor is it immediately apparent what the game’s difficulty level might be, especially if you don’t know how random things like mercenary allocation truly are. Sitting down with it now I did spend more time figuring out the systems, learning how things can vary, and I was able to find some campaigns where the mix of options were entertaining. On the other hand, my first campaign this time was also a poor start and I also found campaigns where the snowballing swung in the other direction and winning started to become a bit too easy. The mix seems decent enough that you can learn which campaigns might be good or bad before playing too deep into them, but even when you’re hitting the sweet spot for whatever you want out of Atom Zombie Smasher, the main thing that can’t be helped is the core gameplay doesn’t feel deep enough to be the kind of game you return to time and time again. Only so many mercenaries, city arrangements not being too wildly different, and the inability to really cater your unit loadout to the next level will lead to some stagnation. The variability in how things pan out can lead to highs and lows, but Atom Zombie Smasher doesn’t feel like it reliably leans in either direction strongly enough unless one side has gotten too big a lead.

 

Atom Zombie Smasher represents an interesting part of digging into your backlog or returning to a game you barely ever touched. This strategy game isn’t a hidden gem or intolerable garbage. It’s a game with some decent ideas, some apparent strengths and weaknesses, but not much that makes it feel like the kind of game you need to play. In a small game collection it might at least be a fine enough game to return to from time to time and one that is somewhat unique if not as robust as it could have been, but in a large backlog, it might not have stood out at all if not for my history with it. It isn’t a forgettable experience, it even has some catchy surf music play during its interesting and slightly detached approach to repelling a zombie outbreak, but there are many more games you should get to, even within the strategy genre, before you add this curiosity to your backlog.