Zombie Apocalypse is a downloadable game for Xbox Live Arcade and is a top down third person shooter which is playable in up to four player. The controls are quite simple, the left analog stick moves and the right one fires the weapon in thr pointed direction. While simple in premise, the game manages to become frustrating within about half an hour. It’s not that I expect a game you can download fo 800 Microsoft points to be immersive, but you have to trudge through the same waves of zombies over and over again. Furthermore, survivors will appear sporadically and wave about like broken windmill in a cyclone only for you to attempt to defend them until a helicopter picks them up. Why the helicopter doesn’t pick you up is anyone’s guess! It does come with rewards though as upon successful extraction they will drop Zombie bait; a bear containing C4 which attracts the horde…basically a cuddly talking pipebomb from Left 4 Dead.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that Zombie Apocalypse is riding on the crest of a wave created by Left 4 Dead as the game attempts to incorporate it’s own “special infected” zombies. The major problem of this is that practically every single zombie you encounter is a special infected and it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of these are and fucking annoying.

• The Big Boy is a one hit kill zombie so best avoided and seeing that the fat fuck can absorb the best part of twenty rounds of ammunition, this becomes quite perilous when there’s a pack of at least thirty! Plus the game doesn’t balance these well as surely an adversary who can kill you in one hit should be slower? Surely?
• The Dodger is more of an annoyance than anything else as they will strafe in your direction and somehow manage to avoid the majority of your bullets even if you have managed to twat them at close range.
• The Granny is definitely one of the stupidest ones as this elderly old bat can throw knives. Um excuse me but when to fucking zombies throw fucking knives?!?! And there not normal knives no, there’s like boomerang style knives which have an inane ability to home in on your location. Either that or world class players of Space Invaders become grannies when the zombie virus infects them.
• The Sherriff zombie takes it to a stupider extreme by toting shotguns. Remember the first time you saw George Romero’s “Land of The Dead” and you thought it was bloody stupid how zombies could operate machinery? Well these guys have shotguns. I mean come on! Zombies cannot operate machinery! It defeats the object of fighting a brain dead horde!
• The Queen is another zombie which instead of verging on the ridiculous has opted for emigating straight out and moving to Retardedville, USA. These may resemble the witch from Left 4 Dead but instead seem to spout an endless chain of bees from their ladygarden and in turn attack you en mass with a frustrating one hit kill decapitation attack. All very gay.
• And finally the Flesh Lump which acts like a “boss” and is completely so far off the pulse with being in a zombie game it might as well been in Animal Crossing. It is a rotund mound of meat which,….wait for it…fires luminescent lasers in a cyclical fashion. At this point you realise that halfway through the concept of the game, the game designers decided to either go on hiatus, or smoke a LOT of weed. It’s fucking stupid and the fact that later on you’re expected to fight this fucking thing in the dark!

While I can see how they’ve attempted to imaginary, the game just doesn’t work as each level in normal mode will take you at least 10-15 minutes to complete it. Worse than that is there’s a good 55 levels in normal mode. I appreciate that you “get your money’s worth” for it but in the converse you will be throwing controllers about left, right and centre and that does not cost less than 800 MS points. Plus the zombies become practically invincible later on when they become luminescent green and “radioactive”. While I’m quick to comment that zombies are still fleshy beings, the fact they are covered in radioactive waste would result in a detrimental effect and certainly wouldn’t become faster. Remember kids, the Incredible Hulk was a comic, not a biography.

If you thought the game in normal mode was long, upon completion you unlock the “7 Days of Hell” mode. While this is only about 7 levels, each level expects you to wade through a good 3000 zombies per level. Now this is even more time consuming and expect a further 7-8 hours of your life to dwindle away. Now considering that Konami produced this game you’d think that they’d know not to overkill the horror. I mean they did a good job with Silent Hill and overkillign those sequences would have killed off the series at iteration number one. But they didn’t, so why do it here? 7 Days of Hell is frankly a giant ball ache and seems hardly worth the time investment for a mere 25G.

The weapons in this game are few and far between. You will find yourself mainly relying on the fully automatic pea shooter but occasionally you will get a rocket launcher, twin SMGs, Chain Cannon and shotgun. The problem is each of these special weapons has about three rounds of ammunition in it and lasts a matter of seconds. And the fact that weapon drops are so rare it makes them a false economy, seeing that the placement of these is usually in the middle of 200 zombies.

So in conclusion, Zombie Apocalypse is worth getting if you find yourself with about 150+ hours on your hands but don’t expect anything special. It’s frustrating from start to finish and is beyond redemption even when you find three other suckers who purchased this as it’s just as annoying in 4-way multiplayer. Instead of the desired effect of 4-way fun, you get 4 people pissed off in 4 respective houses. If you want to sit there and wail through the monotony of endless waves of enemies, buy Earth Defense Force 2017. That will probably work out cheaper is much more fun.