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Sony announces PSN title Zombie Apocalypse

If you just can’t get enough zombie mayhem you’re going to want to check this one out — Konami and Nihilstic have recently announced on the Official Playstation Blog that a new game entitled Zombie Apocalypse is set to hit the Playstation Network sometime next month.

As you can see from the above screenshot Zombie Apocalypse is exactly what it sounds like, a run around and kill as many zombies as you can game. It may seem cliche but this is exactly what the developers were getting at; they wanted a fun to play party game full of gore and fun. 

Multiplayer of course will be included in the form of 4 player co op with 55 increasingly difficult levels to survive. Konami and Nihilistic really focused on creating a game that will appeal to arcade, casual, and hardcore gamers a like and it looks to me like they succeeded with Zombie Apocalypse.

Days 2 Die Game Review–Insane Zombie Blasting Fun

I’m a big fan of zombie movies, and by extension, games that act like them.  And I may well have found the toughest challenge I’ve ever taken on in the form of Days 2 Die.

Newgrounds offers me up an incredible zombie apocalypse scenario–it’s just like a whole lot of others.  No one really knows how it happens, or when it’ll end, but man, is it ever a brutal one.  You’ll be dispatched to survive a legion of the walking dead engaged in attacking you in several different locations, and each wave will get steadily more difficult.  But you’ll have a variety of weapons to choose from, and be able to place barricades to help fend off the waves of walking dead.

In early levels, you’ll be able to set up a simple KZ (kill zone) with the help of your barricades, then just stand behind them and blast away.  But in the later levels (I found it started around the police station) even the best gun you have is downright insufficient to deal with the dense mobs of highly resilient zombies.  Thus, the difficulty level may be just a bit too high for the casual zombie blaster, and even experienced shooter players could be in for a bit more fight than even they can handle.

But either way, you should have plenty of fun with this one, so go on out to Newgrounds and take on Days 2 Die.

Dead Rising Review–A Real Zombie Game

And for those of you talking about that  Land of the Dead shooter, know this. We do not TALK about that Land of the Dead shooter.  Thankfully, not many people have actually had a chance to try it, so its existence is still pretty hush-hush.

Anyway, what I’m talking about today is easily one of the best zombie games I’ve played yet–Dead Rising.  You play as Frank West, photojournalist extraordinaire (he’s covered WARS, you know) and he’s on his way to investigate vague reports of happenings in the small city of Willamette, Colorado.  Willamette isn’t known for a whole lot–in fact, about the only thing Willamette’s got going for it is the super-huge Willamette Mall.  How big is this mall?  Sufficiently big to command a small amusement park inside it, along with a panoply of stores, a bi-level food court, and a park in its center.  Sounds like a nice way to spend the day, but these vague happenings make things a little dicey for the citizens of Willamette–seems that, in the immortal words of Romero himself, the dead are returning to life and attacking the living.  Thus, you go into Willamette armed with your camera and whatever you can find along the way to discover what’s behind the legion of walking dead weekend warriors and see if you can prevent it from getting any farther out than it already is.

I love this game.  There’s no two ways about it–this may well be the first EVER functional Zombie Apocalypse simulator ever released.  The story is unsettlingly deep, with lots of horrendous personality disorders roaming the zombie-infested mall.  There’s a variety of weapons for you to play with, each with its own particular effectiveness level.  Weapons break with use, so you’ll have to continually search for and find new weapons.  Just because you’ve got a sweet baseball bat doesn’t mean it won’t break after you break open a few dozen zombie skulls.
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Left 4 Dead Video Game Review – Better Than Expected

I have to admit that, when I started playing Left 4 Dead, I thought I was going to be offended by its very existence.  I snarled at that game box for what must have been ten minutes before finally grabbing it up and hauling it up to the counter like a small child forced to take medicine. And medicine without the flavor shots added to it–man, we never had THAT kind of thing back when I was a kid unless it was the over-the-counter cough syrup.  Kids today.

Geriatric mutterings aside, I sat down to take my Left 4 Dead medicine, slapped it in my Xbox, and was surprised by the way it actually went down.  Surprisingly smooth, as a matter of fact.

Left 4 Dead basically puts you in a group of four survivors of a zombie apocalypse and gives you five separate scenarios to try and get out of Dodge in as rapid a fashion as possible.  You’ll fight your way through freeway underpasses, through churches, through hospitals and various other scenic locales in a desperate bid for survival.  Along the way, you’ll take on zombies that explode in a cloud of bile when you shoot them (boomers), zombies with enormous tongues that burst into smoke when you shoot them (smokers) and gigantic roid-raged zombies that can throw cars (tanks) along with female zombies that break down sobbing when they’re alone, but if you disturb their mourning they will burst into a homicidal rage and rip you apart with their bare hands.  These are called Witches.

I have been killed by Witches several times now.

I hate Witches with a fury formerly reserved only for child molesters.

But I was surprised at how much fun I had blasting my way through zombie hordes.  Sure, the gameplay is a bit monotonous–go here, shoot that, repeat until your thumbs fall off–but it just felt better overall.  I think it has something to do with the relatively open floor plans of the levels in which I was blasting all those zombies.

I had fun, yes…and I wasn’t enraged by the game itself, but that’s not to say that I’m letting Left 4 Dead off the hook just yet–no sir.  In fact, I’m pretty upset with it, and here’s why.

1. Track Star Zombies.  When the game actually has the characters say, in canon, that “zombies aren’t supposed to be this fast”, they’re RIGHT.  The walking dead are not supposed to be able to sprint without tiring and climb chain-link fences in a couple of bounds.

2. Shoot It In The…Um…Anywhere’s Good, I Guess.  Zombies are not supposed to go down after a couple of rounds to the center of mass.  You’ve got to shoot it in the head, Cooper…not anywhere you please.  Okay, sure, if you shoot the legs you’ll knock them down.  Shoot them in the chest for ballstic impact and some stunning.  But if you want to kill a zombie, you have to destroy the brain or separate the brain from the rest of the body.  Anything else is just a crock perpetrated by people who don’t understand the work of zombie master George Romero.

3. Where The Hell Did They Get All The Steroids?  I’m not sure I even want to know who thought it’d be a good idea to have bloated zombies that throw up on you as a battle tactic, or smoking zombies with tongues that make Gene Simmons’ curl up in the fetal position and whimper.  Don’t even get me started on the tanks.

But if you’re willing to ignore, or at least forgive, still MORE Romero blasphemy, then you’ll probably get along pretty well with Left 4 Dead.  I did, essentially.

Zombie Shootout–Monotonous. Predictible. Fun!

Must be some kind of theme I’ve got going here, because I segue from one action-heavy mindless shoot-o-rama into another one, this time called Zombie Shootout.

With a name like Zombie Shootout, you can probably guess the plot almost instantly–yes, you will shoot zombies. Lots of them. You will be in a boarded up house with three open, interconnected rooms, and zombies will approach those barricades and attempt to get in.  You, meanwhile, must kill them all before they can kill you.  You’ll get a variety of upgrades, including better weapons, better barricades, and the ever popular sentry gun, that opens fire on any zombie (thankfully, not you) that happens to wander in front of it and will do so until it runs out of ammo.

You’ll have to survive twenty waves, and failure is met by the ever-popular “you failed at life” slogan (what’s next, epic fail?).  It’s definitely a fun little time waster, if a bit monotonous, and I don’t think I’m overstepping my bounds saying that the ending you get really isn’t worth the twenty rounds of time you invested, but if you can’t get enough of peeling zombie heads off zombie necks, then this is definitely a game you’ll want to try.

Nihilistic Working Up Zombie Apocalypse

Nihilistic Software, responsible for last year’s beat ‘em up Conan is reportedly working on a downloadable zombie-themed game, according to Destructoid, who cites sources and resumes.

The site states that it will be an “arcade-style” game and will be imaginatively titled Zombie Apocalypse. It is said to be in development for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live and will feature some type of online support.

The game will have players fighting to save survivors from zombie hordes over the course of several in-game days. Weapons include the infamous chainsaw, and there will be “deadly environmental hazards”.