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GDC 2015: Hands-on with Unkilled, a touch-based zombie FPS

Unkillable

GDC 2015: Hands-on with Unkilled, a touch-based zombie FPS
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I tend to avoid first-person shooters on mobile because thinking about how such complicated, precision-based mechanics could work on a phone makes me nervous.

Unkilled, an upcoming zombie game from Madfinger, solves at least one of these potential control issues.

You control both your own movement and the camera by pressing down on the screen with both thumbs, as if using invisible joysticks.

The interesting part is shooting; it's automatic. If you can land your crosshair over an enemy, you'll begin auto-firing.

This isn't new. Madfinger employed the same mechanic in Dead Trigger 2 from 2013.

I can't say how well it worked there (the game scored a Bronze Award in our review), but it worked decently well in Unkilled and allowed for some faster paced action than I would've expected from a touch-based shooter.

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The only downside is the game's level of challenge didn't feel up to par with the relative ease of its controls.

What I played at GDC was only a tech demo, however, and not the full game.

In it, I fought off hordes of respawning zombies and took down a boss, all in a closed-off arena in the form of a New York City neighborhood.

The boss wasn't much more than a muscular bullet sponge that took some circling around and constant firing at to take down.

I can't say much about what Unkilled can offer in terms of story, or a campaign, or even level design this early on, but the core zombie-killing shoot 'em up stuff works pretty well.

Unkilled will be free to play with in-app purchases. How fairly these will be implemented is yet to be seen.

You'll be able to download Unkilled on iOS and Android "soon."

Chloi Rad
Chloi Rad
Chloi games, and Chloi writes, and at some point she made the dangerous decision of merging the two. Now she spends her time formulating words about weird games she finds, playing Dark Souls, and also playing Dark Souls.