Zombie Defense Review

Imagine hunkering down in a location, sandbagging your surroundings to protect yourself, only to try to live night to night in a zombie attack. Most zombie games take the "Alive-4-Ever" approach and have you run around in the open killing zombies, but everyone knows that they crowd around once they see you. Instead, Zombie Defense has you hunkering down and staying put. Sure, they tend to swarm if you stay put long enough, so you have to find new hiding places every night to stay alive.

You start the game with four armed townspeople (I think from Llano, TX), and must stay alive for 20 nights, fighting a battle every night. The fights all start with a defensive segment where you can place your sandbags, much like a tower defense game (the zombies all move in a predictable pattern around your bags), and the few radio controlled bombs that you possess. After the defense is set up, it is up to your people to defend themselves with whatever guns you arm them with. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

After the night is over, assuming that you are still alive, you can search for more weapons (an automatic process) and then choose a new place to hide, or go back to the same place where you have your defenses already set up, but the longer you stay in one spot, the more zombies will swarm.

I think that the concept is appealing to most people, (set up defense, arm with guns, watch the action unfold) but the game could really use upgrades. The characters just act the same, level to level, when it would be extremely easy to add an upgrade system to their accuracy, shot power, or anything else.

The other problem that most people will grow tired of the insane difficulty. Instead of valuing intelligent defensive setups and strategy, Zombie Defense punishes you for just playing. The game makes a point to get you to move locations every night by severely punishing you for staying put, and when you run out of locations it punishes you anyway. Swarms and swarms of zombies will come and there's only so much that your un-upgradeable survivors can do about it. There are also no saves on a night to night basis, so once you die in a level it's back to night one.

Zombie Defense is a great example of a game that has a great idea but doesn't quite deliver in the end. The potential for greatness is there, but I think that it will require a sequel or a massive update to make it right.

One thing to note when/if you get the app. The app itself is a free app, and after level 3 it will ask you to buy the rest of the game as an in-app purchase.