#KILLALLZOMBIES – the name says it all. The game is a top-down, twin-stick shooter where you are trapped in a small arena with waves of zombies trying to kill you or destroy your base. Your mission? To kill all the zombies and survive as long as possible.
The controls are straight-forward with the left stick used to control movement, the right stick for aiming and firing your weapon and the right trigger for reloading. You start off with a weak pistol but you can unlock more powerful weapons like the shotgun and uzi very easily just by playing the game. I had unlocked all the weapons within my first 30 minutes of playing the game. The unlocked weapons are essential for long runs because #KILLALLZOMBIES is a difficult game. There were many times when I died after less than 4 minutes due to being overwhelmed by the number of zombies running at you. The first boss I fought one-hit killed me within seconds of reaching him!
The gameplay and mechanics don’t progress or change at all as you play the game. The longer I played the more repetitive it felt, killing zombies over and over and running around the small arena trying to stay ahead of them. The only really dynamic aspect of the game is the perk system. As you kill zombies you level up and for each level you gain, you can use one perk. You can choose one of four perks and they are offered at random. You may have a choice of four very useful perks like avoiding damage 90% of the time or regenerating health or you may get stuck with some very bad options. The bad perks include instant death for the player – although im not sure why anyone would choose that. The perks added some much-needed variety to the game and can give players access to special weapons like the alien plasma gun.
The game has two modes, a survival mode where zombies will chase you around the arena to kill you and a base defend mode, where zombies will try to destroy your base and you need to stop them. The base defend mode allows you to buy turrets to help kill the zombies before reaching your base. I found the survival mode more enjoyable mainly because defending your base restricts you to staying in one area of the map so that you can defend the base.
#KILLALLZOMBIES was released on home consoles and PC but the Vita version has taken a major hit in terms of graphics and sound. Shadows, detail and variety of the objects on the map have all been significantly scaled back so that the Vita version looks like a game from the original Playstation. The sound of the bullets and zombies are muted so that shooting sounded weak and unimpressive. The game has a rock music soundtrack which should add to the frantic nature of the game, but after playing the game for several hours, it just became annoying.
I’ve talked a lot about the negatives of the game but there are some redeeming features. I never experienced any slow down, even with a large number of zombies on-screen and it is quite a fun and addictive game. I would often jump straight back in and have another go after dying and with each run lasting around 5 minutes, I found it easy to tell myself I’ll have just one more go.
At £4, it’s not an expensive game but when you compare it to Dead Nation’s price on PS Vita of £6.49 (another twin stick zombie shooter with far more variety and environments, better graphics and more things to do), #KILLALLZOMBIES would not be my first choice for a zombie-killing twin-stick shooter.
When I first started the game, I expected I would not enjoy my time with it, but overall I did find it fun and kept coming back again and again. However, the difficulty meant that I was replaying the same waves over and over which became monotonous over time. I expect most people would get a few hours of enjoyment from #KILLALLZOMBIES but there are far better twin stick shooters on the Vita like Dead Nation, Geometry Wars or Super Star Dust Delta that I would recommend instead.
REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation Vita code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
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