A time-travel zomb-tastic pixel-fest!!!
That might be the best way to describe “Zombie Party”, the action / RPG / old school shoot-em-up game from Peach Pie Productions. Although it’s still in beta, this game offers plenty of entertainment… for a price.
Bang! Boom! Splatsh!
In Zombie Party, you are a time-traveller who has to fight hordes of zombies, aliens, strange poisonous spiders, and other highly dangerous vermin in order to… uhm… survive I guess? Basically, you kill every monster on the map, and wait for the next wave to spawn. It’s as simplistic as that.
The developer also added some sort of story to it in the form of a time-travel plot and multiple levels or ‘worlds’ that you need to get through before you get home safely, but with a collection of crazy weaponry and a gazillion kills on your sleeve.
Added to that are several upgrades for your guns, including artefacts that provide you with magical properties, a skill point system that enables you to choose how to develop your character, magic for your character, pick-ups, a store in which you can buy extra ammo or new weapons, and the possibility to explore several game modes such as story, adventure, survival, co-op, etc…
At times, I thought there was simply too much going on, as if the developers wanted to cram every game mode and feature in that they could think of. This results in chaotic gameplay, which is fun for shorter gaming sessions, but not really for extended periods of time.
Pixelated Fun-Times with Bland Sounds
The graphics in this game are rather unforgiving, but really add to the general theme of the game: you kill enemies all around, and colours are splashed here and there, adding more variety to the mayhem. Together with the pixelated world around you, this feels really old school, and AWESOME. There’s nothing better than reliving the times when developers would upload flash games to the net, with simple graphics but fun gameplay. Zombie Party is such a game: simple graphics, twice the fun.
Sadly, the sound design is not really entertaining. In a game that focuses on an orgy of enemies and colours, the sounds are rather boring. Even the simple sound of picking up a gold coin – we all know the Mario version of that – is uninteresting. A shame the game doesn’t provide a kick-ass 8-bit soundtrack that would really hype you up every time you boot up the game.
| The Good: | The Bad: |
| + Brainless entertainment | – Bland Soundtrack |
| + A lot of variety & game modes | – Not every aspect is as developed as others |
Game Over
All in all, Zombie Party isn’t a bad game. It simply bites off more than it can chew, and can’t deliver on every aspect it promises to give you. I had fun blasting monsters to tiny pixels, but I wasn’t really interested in upgrading my weaponry to create the ‘ultimate’ weapon. If it shoots, I’ll use it. I got the overall ‘flash game’ vibe quite often, and I couldn’t help but notice that even though the game is still in beta, the price for this indie is already rather high for a game that is trying to give you seizures after 10 seconds. Perhaps in a couple of months, it will be more balanced, and more fine-tuned. Meanwhile, I’ll keep visiting this party, perhaps just to say hi, have some fun, then leave before the whole thing crashes.
3 out of 5
