Zombie Gunship Arcade Review

Zombie Gunship Arcade takes the core idea of Zombie Gunship, being that of killing hordes of zombies from a gunship while not killing the humans among the hordes, and makes it into a Flappy Bird game (which still needs a good genre name: flaplike?). Basically, players have to tap to flap the gunship upward, which also fires a shot down at the zombies below.

Now, here's where the challenge begins. See, killing one human is Game Over. The ship drops pretty quickly while it's in the air, and the shots come in at a slight angle. So, doing well in Zombie Gunship Arcade is all about knowing when not to flap.

It's the video game equivalent of looking at negative space art, because it's just constantly challenging one's natural instinct to keep flapping to not crash. Every flap near a human is a risk: and the splash damage from each shot doesn't help keep the humans alive either. Good players will likely be figuring out just how to stay far enough above ground so that they don't crash before they hit a human. The angled shots mean there's some offset to the timing of flaps, and it makes flying higher up in the air to be a challenging proposition since there's more offset of when a shot can be fired to not hit a human.

It's a unique challenge, and one that I imagine core gamers will revel in: if Flappy Bird and other flaplikes feel like a stupid challenge, this feels more intelligent. Though really, the games work in similar ways: the humans are the pipes, that difficult-to-traverse challenge.

Yet because that challenge is a bit more abstract, with timing not to hit humans and not to hit the ground, it's not as simple, and perhaps not as immediately accessible or satisfying because it's about what the player doesn't do. The scoring being about zombie killing rather than number of humans not killed perhaps makes the leaderboards have more variety, but it eliminates that simplicity of scoring that makes high score competitions in other flaplikes so much fun.

Still, I love the way that Zombie Gunship has been adapted, and I love that it brings a new kind of challenge to a genre that has much imitation through its simplistic nature, and has sense of playfulness to it. For those who love Zombie Gunship, this is a must-download.