Zombie Neighborhood for iPad

So, most zombie games involve the undead somehow ending up on Earth, looking for brains. Zombie Neighborhood for iPad involves quite the opposite, as the protagonist himself is from a zombie infested planet. After sustaining a bite from an alien planet he comes home as a human. What’s more, he likes it. So as James, you have to fight off what was once the community that you presumably lived peacefully in, using any means at your disposal.

Which means guns. Lots of guns. You have access to a pistol, shotgun, sub-machine gun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, grenades and even a chainsaw, but you can only equip three of these at once. By purchasing ammunition and upgrades through Zombay you can effectively silence the hordes of undead that break down your front and back doors to get inside your house and try to eat your brains.

[caption id="attachment_56583" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Dude... are we next?!"]

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As well as many superbly drawn zombies, you have zombie dogs and bats that also want a piece of you. Sometimes they may get what they’re after, but happily if you die you get to keep all of the upgrades and cash you had at the time, so you can upgrade your guns and start with a better advantage. There’s not many problems in keeping up with the game on the Normal difficulty setting, until you reach the ending wave which is fairly brutal; you will need to have all of the best guns fully upgraded and fully stocked with ammunition to make it through.

The default control scheme is insufficient; you basically tap the zombies to shoot and move left and right with the arrows on the side of the screen. Switching weapons whilst doing all of that is a pain but luckily the developer has provided an alternate control scheme (enabled from the options menu) that has an aiming pad on the right hand side of the screen. This makes the game much easier and fun to play and should really be the default scheme.

Blasting zombies is still really fun even after the many games I’ve played that feature the undead, and of course the game graphics help a lot in this regard. However, the shop screen could use a little more polish and thought, as it looks slightly tacky when comparing it against the excellent in-game scenery.

Zombie Neighborhood for iPad does exactly what it says on the tin; it’s a funny zombie-themed shoot-em-up that while repetitive offers a decent experience; once you’ve played it through once then you’ll most likely put it down for good. It’s not quite a must-have, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.