Woody Two-Legs: Attack of the Zombie Pirates – PC Review

Aaarrggghhh! Me hearties. Brace the main sail, show ye colours and blow the man down, the scurvy lily-livered landlubber. And that’s about all I can do for now, I’ll leave the rest of the pirate-isms for Cap’n Woody Two-legs and his crew of swarthy buccaneers. This delightful little game is brought to us by those nice folks at Paradox Interactive and Nitro Games who seem to have a knack for coming up with a host of great story lines and games.

Woody Two-Legs: Attack of the Zombie Pirates is no different and we pick up the story on the eve of Halloween as the Cap’n has stolen a very special pile of treasure belonging to a certain Mr. David Jones. Needless to say, Mr. Jones wants it back, and as it’s that witching time of year, he’s gone overboard (get it?) and unleashed hoards of zombie pirates to recover his much loved family jewels (not in that sense!) The fearless Cap’n, being the erm.. fearless Cap’n that he is, isn’t going to give up that easily. He spies an island off his Port Bow (which ever direction that is) and decides to bury his treasure there. Just as he’s covering the last of the doubloons, who should appear on the horizon? None other than old DJ himself, complete with an armada of none too pleased zombies. ‘Give it back,’ says DJ (or words to that effect) ‘With the corner up, pal.’ Replies the Cap’n. And so begins the attack of the Zombie Pirates.

You start the game with your ship spawning next to the island your treasure is on, surrounded by the beautiful blue of the sea. A helpful graphical list showing the types of zombie that will attack and what their main focus is: ships that try to either steal your treasure or kill you or both. This is followed by a brief run-down of the controls to prepare you for battle, then you’re off. Control is by either keyboard or control pad. Personally I found the keyboard better and you are given a good thirty seconds or so to get used to whizzing around the deep blue sea and firing the canons before the first wave attacks.

Things start off fairly easy, just a few enemy ships to beat off, but it’s not long before the action heats up and you find yourself rushing from one side of the island to the other in a vain attempt to fight off the pirates who are trying to steal your treasure, whilst also trying to destroy and find cover from the ones who would rather see you at the bottom of the sea. After a while you begin to get a little foamy around the mouth, however, help is at hand. Every so often a destroyed pirate ship will drop a crate which contains either a power-up, a power-down or a random selection from the latter. Power-ups can be a speed boost, fire balls/balls of steel (instead of the usual canon balls), a homing dolphin, a web or mines, which you can lay around your precious island. Equally the power-downs make you feel like your sailing through treacle or can wipe out a special weapon, such as the homing dolphin or make the enemy ultra aggressive, as if they didn’t need it already.

If you manage to wipe out a level’s worth of zombie, skeleton or ghost ships you get to face the end of the level boss, be that the Kraken, a giant ghost ship, giant skeleton ship or the big DJ himself. Each boss has a particular patten off attack and similarly a weakness that can be exploited before you end up sinking and having to re-spawn again. There are five levels of mayhem to combat through with over eighty waves of undead sailors, who are not in a very good mood. Beat this lot and you get to unlock the harder levels. Achieve a fantastic high score and you can submit it online to the Woody Two-Legs online scoreboard – which is something I embarrassingly didn’t get too high on. The game can be completed on easy in just an hour or two, but when playing on the harder settings the game suddenly kicks into another gear and you soon find yourself hamming away at the keyboard, tears in your eyes, as the rapid finger work on the arrow keys helps develop a pair of forearms that would bring an envious glance from Popeye.

The graphics are colourful and full of life, shown from a 3D, bird’s eye view they display a small portion of the game area, so tactful movement is necessary, whilst still protecting your treasure. The music is a mix of a sea-shanty little numbers whilst the zombie waves attack, followed by a more haunting tone for the end of level bosses, together with the explosions of the canon fire and the jingling of coins to signal if an enemy has reached your island, and is stealing your treasure. It all comes together rather well and adds to the fun and amusement of the game.

Woody Two-Legs is very addictive and can have you both tearing your hair out in frustration or cheering loudly as you dispatch the Kraken to the briny deep. I would definitely recommend this enjoyable title to anyone and as it’s only the budget price of a few quid (£3.49 from gamersgate) you can’t go wrong. Avast me hearties, swab the decks… I promise I’ll stop that now.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.