Zombie Infection Review

With the legion of goofy, cartoony, humorous, and cutesy zombie games in the App Store, it's refreshing to headshot an old-fashioned undead cannibal once in awhile. It is in that spirit that I looked at Zombie Infection, the best survival horror game on the iPhone.

Zombie Infection is a take-off on Resident Evil from the masters of the iPhone imitation, Gameloft. Fans of RE will see a lot of echoes in this tale of a soldier and his attractive partner fending off undead in South America. Like many Gameloft games, this similarity will either bother you or it won't. For me, even though it's derivative, it's still a lot of fun.

The game itself is a pretty straightforward shooter. There are plenty of zombies and other monstrosities to target across a dozen levels, plus doors to open, switches to activate, and crates to smash. The game is also peppered with touch-based skill challenges, each requiring you to either perform some repetitive motion or to touch points at the right time and/or in the right sequence. It's a bit mindless at times, mostly chasing the next path point and being attacked from all sides, but it's mindless in a good B-movie way. And I have to give them credit for the boss battles, which often required something more than just dodge-and-shoot.

At this point, Gameloft has pretty much standardized their control scheme, and there's nothing new here. If you've played NOVA, Brothers in Arms 2, or even Hero of Sparta, you'll pick Zombie Infection up quickly. NOVA's snap-to crosshairs has been replaced by a laser sight, which I liked more as it let me target heads and limbs. The one thing I disliked was the non-persistent turn control, which makes it difficult to whip around quickly when surrounded by enemies.

Visually the game gets the job done. The graphics are on par with those in NOVA from a technical perspective, though NOVA had a better design overall. The audio is sufficiently creepy, with plenty of zombie moans and an action track that kicks in whenever enemies are near. The voice acting in this one wasn't bad, either.

Is it a perfect game? No. Is it a heck of a lot of fun? Yeah. It's certainly one of the better zombie games in the App Store, and a more enjoyable zombie shooter than any of Capcom's attempts to port RE to the device. For fans of zombies and third-person shooters, Zombie Infection is a title to get.