Zombie Wonderland

DLC Review from Matt - Tuesday, 27 July 2010 @ 4:29pm

The world has gone Zombie crazy, and frankly what's not to like? They're slow and clumsy, but they're also unambiguously bad, quite literally rotten, and they make a good and completely unempathetic enemy.

The iPhone is no stranger to their slaughter either. Zombie Wonderland isn't the first game to bring about their demise, but what it does do is present it in a very different and unique way. 

Zombie Wonderland stars Chuck, a lantern jawed and kinda red necked hero, who helps out post-apocalyptically by keeping various houses clear of the undead menace.

Chuck takes on the zombie hordes with your help!

The way this works is pretty simple. Chuck is inside the house, and the zombies are outside. Chuck is interested in maintaining that status quo, while the necrotising hordes have a vested interest in a change of scenery/lunch. Armed at first only with his trusty shotgun, Chuck moves back and forth from window to window, taking potshots at zombies in the hopes of arresting their progress and/or blowing off their moaning heads. If a zombie makes it to the window he will begin to crawl into it, but don't fear, all is not lost! You can still shoot at zombies who are inside the house, and in the later levels (especially early in them) you often have to do so.

The downside of shooting at them when they're inside is the mess. As you know, when you shoot a zombie IRL their guts spray onto the floor. Such a thing is not acceptable and Chuck is tasked with mopping the zombies while he's stopping the zombies, if you know what I mean. An unclean floor gives an icon (it's actually a vacuum cleaner but that didn't rhyme and makes no sense anyway) and tapping on that lets you drag it back and forth to clean up guts-piles.

It's worth pointing out that this doesn't happen often. Quite quickly you get "powerups" that make keeping out the zombies easier, starting with planks you can use to fortify the windows. Going to an "unplanked" window will let you tap merrily on the new hammer icon, and that will fortify it. The fortified windows take MUCH longer for the undead menaces to enter, and in fact can be left a surprisingly long time. Another powerup you get is a machine gun. This isn't something you carry, in fact it's a placed auto-aiming sentry gun you can put at a single window. Doing this (along with fortifying that window) makes one of the windows basically impregnable, so picking one that's out of the way really reduces the amount of work you have to do.

Defend the house! Errr... Garage

Naturally as your own firepower and effectiveness goes up so does that of the zombies. Flaming zombies, grannies and hulk zombies are all more powerful when they hit, taking out the machine-gun and/or any planks on the window there. Focussing on these guys is the key to surviving your encounters with the undead.

Though in all fairness, survival is fairly trivial until the very end. I rarely got zombies into my houses and even when I did it was generally a one off at the start before you got a chance to fortify all the windows. Winning each level is easy, and deaths are very rare. It took until almost the end of the game for me to actually die, not counting one time where I stopped playing because I was walking across the road IRL and didn't want to get hit by cars.

Aside from the low difficulty, ZW has a few flaws. While the sound clips are natty in a Duke Nukem bravado kind of way they do grate on you after a little while. There's also the ability to spin the isometric view of the house to a better angle to see the incoming zombies. This is good in theory, but in practise it just rotates right back round again to some preset that might or might not be useful. This can make it impossible to see what's coming for you, though really it still gives you plenty of time. There are times when you want to shoot things, but the hammer icon is in the way, and you have no choice but to fortify the window and THEN shoot the zombie trying to claw your face. That's kind of frustrating, but again, it doesn't really make much difference.

Game over. You won't be seeing this screen a lot.

Zombie Wonderland is a fun diversion, and it's presented reasonably well. Picking up the gameplay mechanic is a doddle, literally "tap on anything that isn't you" and it moves along at a relatively solid pace. I don't really know what to say more than that, though. It's well done, but there's something missing. The gameplay is well executed, but not actually particularly compelling. There's no addictiveness or "one more go" type craving, and you can quite happily play it or not play it with equal enthusiasm.

Zombie Wonderland is a reasonable purchase if you particularly feel like killing zombies on the run but there are a lot more compelling offerings on the iPhone. I found myself wanting it to do a fair bit more than it ended up doing.

Action a plenty here in zombie wonderland

Pros

Nice graphics, simple and intuitive gameplay, fun voice acting and overall "plot". Everyone likes zombies.

Cons

Weapons don't upgrade much, way too easy, machine gun is kind of a cheat, rotating view does nothing.