Zombies Ruined My Day

It’s been said that President James Garfield could write Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right hand at the same time. Pretty impressive, assuming that every single guest he performed this for could tell both Greek and Latin apart from random chicken scratches. But if it was true, it’s an amazing trick. Let’s see the smug bastard take a crack at Zombies Ruined My Day, a hoard shooter with a control scheme about as inviting as a radioactive doorbell.

The story here is your typical zombie game clap trap: zombies invade and you are able to conveniently get your hands on enough artillery to wipe out the population of a small country. The game play takes place on a single screen. There are doors that zombies march out of single-file in an orderly manner. They walk in a straight line until they hit a wall, at which point they walk the other direction. You’re a dude at the bottom of the screen who has to kill them before they get you and turn you into a zombie yourself.

By the way, isn’t that the biggest flaw with all these zombie games and films? Let’s say the zombie outbreak takes place. In most cases, it’s only a handful of people who initially start as zombies. Then they bite someone and that person becomes a zombie too. Well wait a second, if zombies are trying to eat the people, how come there’s always enough left of their victims for them to turn into zombies themselves? What, are they only sampling the people like it’s demo day at Costco? Makes no damn sense.

So back to the game.  You have zombies and you have guns. You move with the left stick and aim with the right one, with the right trigger to shoot. That’s assuming you have a gun. If you’re using a grenade or putting a barrier down, you use the right trigger to increase throwing strength and the left trigger to decrease it. You press up on the D pad to throw. You cycle through your various weapons using the bumpers. And while you juggle through all that, there are dozens of zombies on-screen, all of whom will kill you in one hit. You have very limited room to move and a very limited jump button. You can never leave the bottom level of a stage, so the jumping only works to hop over zombies. The problem there is most of the time there’s a string of them coming at you with no space in-between to safely leap.

I tried playing on normal difficulty but chickened out on the second world. I switched over to easy mode and found that the game still was frustratingly hard. I thought zombie canon was well established: one shot to the head, pffph, dead. Not here. The baddies simply take way too many shots to kill. Your starter pistol might as well be shooting snap ‘n’ pops for all the good it does. Even with a shotgun you’re looking at a minimum of two shots for even basic zombies.   Later in the game you do get other shooting game standbys like a rocket launcher or a minigun.  Of course if you actually make it that far you’ll have lost your will to live. At some point in the game survivors are introduced and you have to protect them from being eaten as well, while juggling everything else. Yea, fuck that with an unlubricated, razor-encrusted dildo.

Even if the controls were more accessible, I don’t think it would matter much. Zombies Ruined My Day is just plain boring. The graphics are very nice, but that’s all it has going for it.  The game play is repetitive, redundant, and repetitive. Oddly enough, Zombies Ruined My Day seems like it was built with co-op in mind, but that feature is nowhere to be found. Having some help might have taken the sting out a little. Not likely. Suckering someone into playing a game this dull is a quick way to lose friends. The only use I could think of for it would be a drug-free alternative for medically induced comas.

Zombies Ruined My Day was developed by Mancebo Games

80 Microsoft Points felt “Yawn of the Dead” would have been a better title in the making of this review.