Touché, bitches!

Zombies a’ comin’

Do you remember Bomberman? That game created around the mid eighties where you would place ye olde style bombs on the map to destroy walls and eventually to corner and burn your opponent? I liked that game. It was great fun as a 4+ player game on console. Easy controls, easy gameplay, and good enough ‘ai’ for a single player game. Atom Zombie Smasher sorta reminded me of that (I bought it on Steam). It has the same concept: Buildings that crumble. Bombs to be dropped. Enemies to defeat. It also is fun.

Except now we have zombies. Or more little magenta squares. They like to go after those little yellow squares and convert them to more little red squares, giving you an exponential rise of magenta squares if you don’t drop enough of those bombs and lift off enough of those choppers.

It’s pretty micro intensive. With all those chopper evacs, dynamite timing, road blocking and mortar drops. But let me tell you now. I suck at it.

I ended up playing the same level over and over because those pesky zombie dots were eating and converting all my freaked out yellow frenz. No matter. I’ll just blow them up too!

As a result of my ass being majorly pwnD by the damned red squares I decided I’d play on the easiest setting or modifier. Casual. I like the sound of some of these other mods, and I did try … but because it is the start of the list don’t make it the easiest.

This time round:

I still sorta suck. No matter. Continue? 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.

Let’s start with the interface. Pretty clean, good mapping of shortcut keys, nice little graphics, and tool or weapon bar down the bottom of the screen. Only gripe I have is when I use the number keys to switch weapons/tools and I’m deep in magenta dots, I don’t know what weapon I have selected until the cool-off period is done. Maybe something like the AutoCAD dynamic tool can do wonders here, and not an annoyance like in CAD.

And since we are in cool-off time, let’s talk a bit about it.

RELOADING…REPOSITIONING…MOVING…

I think it is a good inclusion in the game, makes it harder. Mortar shells don’t instantly drop where you click it, but it might take 8 seconds, Snipers have to re-aim, and that chopper actually feels like it is flying off to a medical camp a la M*A*S*H.

You also have the opportunity to upgrade your weapons, with a simple zombie/zed death counter per weapon as a means of getting points. The more dead = more points = more upgrades.

BAM-DI-BAM.

That above is an awesome weapon, it rains a torrent of shells in a large area, decimating all below.
Buildings. Yellow dots. Magenta dots. Everything.
I believe that there are a few of this special weapons…yet to see them though.

Now what are these little sparkling cyan dots?
Scientists?!
What use are they? Research.

There is a whole other interface for you to ‘spend’ those smart little braincells.

I wonder where those blue dots go after being spent on 120% increased efficiency on the mortars, would like to buy them a beer.

With all that new and improved weaponry, I’d like to show you the zed only map. This is where you have to time and lure them into a section of the map before you drop the big ones on them.

Swoosh. Bang. Boom. Splatter. Dust.

Arbitrary number divided by 10: 8/10