The Haunted Hoard: Zombie Shooter (PC)

When you sit down with a video game after a long hard day, you don’t always want an involved skill challenge or a complicated emotional story. Sometimes, you just want to do something brainless but thrilling, like mulching hundreds of zombies with ease. Zombie Shooter’s basic name promises exactly that, just a game to pop on and blast away the undead without much work involved. It would be very easy for it to fill that specific role and get a pass for people looking for something so straightforward, but surprisingly, Zombie Shooter can’t even manage such a basic concept well.

As soon as you select the campaign or even just the instructions in Zombie Shooter, you’ll notice immediately it is rife with typos and the occasional unusual grammar. The game’s creators, Sigma Team, were a Russian studio so part of it may fall on poor translation, and since important information is usually easy to parse, the plethora of spelling and punctuation mistakes don’t really impact what most people will come to the game for. The plot isn’t exactly complicated either, there’s a 10 mission campaign where you play as either Drake McMannis or Sammy Swearengen who technically vary in terms of things like health, speed, and accuracy but not in an overly meaningful way. Whichever one you pick heads out to kill zombies and investigate the source of the undead outbreak, Zombie Shooter impressing a touch for its interesting use of the lesser known word “nidus” to describe the origin point of the virus. Essentially the plot is just to move you from military bases to science labs, all of them teeming with more zombies than the last.

To fight against the zombies, you initially start off with only a pair of pistols, but these handguns have infinite ammo and it might be tempting to lean on them heavily because of this. Their shots can go a bit wide fairly often but they fire fast, but Zombie Shooter’s devotion to being a simplistic power fantasy means once you start unlocking the stronger weapons, it doesn’t really limit them as much as you might expect. Ammunition for them is found with enough regularity that you likely won’t need to swap down to weaker firearms unless you are just firing constantly. Zombie Shooter is nearly a top-down shooter, the environment tilted just enough that it often obscures important parts of the environment, the otherwise serviceable map designs also let down by the fact you often can’t see a room beyond a door until you try and enter it despite the fact most doorways will be clogged by zombies just on the other side. You aim by moving your mouse towards what you want to shoot, the exact placement more important for weapons like the rocket launcher that will detonate once it reaches the crosshairs. Besides a weapon like the grenade launcher whose bouncing explosives can come back and hit you, most of the time the new zombie-killing methods you acquire are going to be clean power upgrades to what you were using before, and there is some satisfaction in trying out a new gun and seeing it slice through the undead like butter when your previous gun needed to chew them up before taking them down.

Zombie Shooter does try to gradually introduce new undead to make it more than a pure uncontested murder fest. Early human zombies are joined by fast undead rats and dogs, but later you get some living dead who know how to use firearms or are mutated into strange new forms that grant them special powers. The creatures that look like the human circulatory system has exited the body and is now firing darts at you are especially striking in appearance, although the campaign only has one true boss to contend with. Some tough zombies do cap off early levels before you’ve acquired strong enough guns to trivialize them, but besides the final boss, there is no real fight in Zombie Shooter where you need to work for your wins. It’s very easy to funnel hordes of zombies into a killing corridor and hold down fire, the ones who fire back usually just asking you to zigzag some as you keep up your assault. Zombies do drop useful items though, health refills, ammunition, and the cash and experience you can use between levels to buy upgrades to your character and firearms, so sometimes you run into the thick of it if you want to claim your rewards for a moment. Otherwise, it does almost hit that simple power trip idea of wiping out the zombie apocalypse by yourself with endless streams of bullets.

However, issues start to seep into Zombie Shooter’s design that distract you from the mindless killing of brain eaters. Not only is it easy to get caught on bits of the environment, sometimes barriers are in the middle of a room but completely invisible, leading to potential frustration as you don’t know why you can’t move when the zombies are surrounding you. What’s worse, Zombie Shooter has a nasty habit of crashing in the campaign. While you can acquire extra lives so if you die in a level you should respawn back at the start but with all your zombie killing still saved, many times dying in Zombie Shooter just crashes the entire game and requires you to start the stage over. This might be a glitch caused by getting killed by a projectile, but projectiles are probably the only thing that will kill you in Zombie Shooter since the regular rabble likely don’t have a chance at touching you thanks to your power level. This technically adds some extra difficulty and incentivizes collecting health more often, but it also encourages you to make the simplistic zombie shooting even simpler by playing it safe and relying on funneling techniques more often.

Zombie Shooter can load levels with an impressive level of undead enemies, and it’s even more impressive that killing them will leave the area coated in an ever increasing amount of zombie viscera. You get to see the gnarly work of your weapons splashed over the environment, but campaign levels in Zombie Shooter can definitely drag on. There are level chokepoints or areas with zombie spawning entryways that lead to huge numbers of the walking dead cluttering the area, and this doesn’t really amount to much compared to more reasonable zombie groups. You just spend more time firing your strong weapons into the pack, hoping the numbers will thin so maybe you can explore a little for goodies or maybe reach a point where some new monster type is introduced. They’ll become part of the obnoxious enemy numbers in time though, it not exactly thrilling to stand in place and fire until all the organic matter clogging the way ahead has been reduced to blood puddles.

Zombie Shooter does offer two additional modes after you’ve completed its short campaign, but neither is particularly well designed for their concept. Survive has you fight off slowly escalating waves of undead in an open grassy area, the goal being to last as long as you can. Over time, stronger enemies join in, but when you defeat this mode’s boss monsters (which are just tougher variants of regular undead) you’ll get new weapons to fight back with. However, eventually the swarm simply becomes too massive before you’ve even really made it far into the game’s weapon list. The zombies being able to come from all sides makes it tougher to manage and you don’t really have alternatives to firing through them with your strongest weapons and maybe trying to grab useful pick-ups some of them drop. There was potential for this mode, you can collect permanent upgrades to health and the like here instead of buying them, but it’s all wiped on a loss and it doesn’t feel like there’s room for even the most basic survival strategies to work once the zombie numbers become overwhelming.

The other mode on offer is even weaker and less thought out though. Gun Stand has you utilize a turret that you briefly get to play with in the campaign, it now serving as your only means of attack. In the campaign mission it is powerful but a bit boring to use since you often need to walk out and bait enemies towards it as a huge horde is waiting just off-screen and out of the line of fire after your initial salvos, but Gun Stand at least has the undead all trying to rush the turret and break through the barriers protecting it from destruction. However, all you really do is point and shoot as they come at you from all angles, and while you build up to a screen clearing nuke with frequent regularity, you also can’t really do much but hold down fire and aim here and again, enemy numbers eventually become too much and you just have to accept your fated loss. It doesn’t give you the room for strategy save firing on the stronger guys which is really just common sense. Replaying the campaign isn’t really going to feel much different even on varying difficulties, so Zombie Shooter actually ends up a pretty paltry offering if you’re looking for the kind of game you can return to again and again for uncomplicated action.

THE VERDICT: While Zombie Shooter seems to have some small understanding that it should be providing tons of easy kills for people looking for a simplistic shooter, its offerings are lean and made harder to enjoy by a bad viewing angle and game crashes. Survive and Gun Stand barely feel worth checking out, and while the campaign lets you work towards upgrades and gives you some incentive to get in the fray to grab pick-ups, it also packs levels with so many easily killed undead it starts to lose its effect.

And so, I give Zombie Shooter for PC…

A BAD rating. I must concede, before the number of zombies in a level stops meaning anything in the face of your power, Zombie Shooter will deliver on its promise of uncomplicated straightforward zombie killing action. The undead that can fire back actually oppose you somewhat well when you first meet them and before you have weapons that trivialize them, and levels can be more about poking around looking for useful items before you’ve got a magma spewing gun you can just fire down a corridor and wait until there are no more bodies to hit. The campaign is still very short and it really could have used more time to stretch out that period where you’re still a one-man army but one that has to work a bit to survive. Some of the most powerful weapons could have also been properly limited in their ammunition availability, or at least if the game wants you to have an unopposed killing spree it could craft moments for it while still setting aside areas where you have to work at least a little bit to keep up the fight effectively. The two extra modes being so barren and basic does show that Zombie Shooter thinks it can get away with relying almost purely on the base desire of blasting waves of undead monsters into bloody bits, it not even putting in enough thought to let those modes last long enough to have interesting growth. Evolution is what Zombie Shooter is missing and where it does attempt it, you either get big baddies who lose their luster quickly or the guns that help those foes start to feel like cannon fodder.

There are arcade and block dropping games that eventually force you out through unmanageable escalation, but Zombie Shooter’s two extra modes don’t reach that point in an interesting way. The campaign at least has a bit of a grace period where the early levels can ask you to work a little to win, but its escalation is actually too weak to push you out since it too often plateaus and hopes huge numbers of undead make up for a lack of meaningful variation. You’re still always going to be blasting zombies to bits in the way the game promises with its simplistic premise, something that gives it some moments where that works as planned and others where you start to wonder why you’re playing if all you have to do is stand in place and hold down fire. Satisfying and simple zombie shooting isn’t so rare in the video game world you need to lean on this somewhat shoddy effort to provide it, Zombie Shooter showing that you do need to put some thought into mindless fun sometimes or else you’ll be passed over for a game that does do more than the bare minimum.