Zombie Mob Defense

Whole waves of mobile games these days seem to revolve around the same thing: killing zombies.

These undead-slaying games are so common that should zombies actually ever rise from their graves we'll likely consider the whole thing passe, rolling our eyes with affected boredom as they turn our craniums into soup bowls.

Zombie Mob Defense feels like the product of several other games rather than anything fresh in its own right.

Broadly speaking, this is part tower defence, part castle vs castle, but with no rival base to attack you instead focus on tooling up your own garrison – in this case, a wall separating the hordes from the rest of the population.

Doing so means setting up weapons and various other defences to take out the zombies before they make it to the other side, as well as calling on other special moves, such as air attacks.

All this takes place on what is essentially a grid, with zombies approaching in set lines. Each unit you deploy to stand guard uses up a grid square and fires only directly ahead, so both positioning and managing the space on offer are crucial to your success.

The weapons themselves range from force fields to mines, though the majority of the credits required to equip them will be spent on placing gun points that fire off at your foe in regular intervals.

What makes the whole affair slightly disjointed, however, is the manner in which said credits are earned.

Instead of simply accumulating as time passes, or being topped up via kills, your bank balance only expands if you place specialist 'bank units'.

Given you can't expand your arsenal until the money starts rolling in, this means the first thing you do every stage is place several of these, both taking up space on the grid and wasting time at the start of each level.

It also adds nothing to the strategy side of play, given that deploying them in each and every level is a no brainer.

Zombie Mob Defense plays like an awkward fusion of several different ideas that don't really work together.

There's nothing especially bad, offensive, or even remotely unpalatable about Digital Chocolate's zombie soiree, but in a genre already full of big players there's no room for dead meat.