Be honest. Who wouldn’t shoot a zombie if they were faced with one? And if the undead happened to be of the mutant, alien kind? Well, you hardly need to ask the question.
Clearly it’s something PomPom has considered, though, because the developer has built an entire game based around the premise.
Alien Zombie Death, apart from being brilliantly titled, is concerned with little more than exterminating a great number of nasty, ugly creatures.
Echoing the simplicity of the premise are the levels and controls. The former - known as planets - unlock sequentially and end up being variations on the same theme: each of the seven stages offers a number of stacked platforms, and these can vary in length or number. (In addition, every stage offers a ‘Moon’ alternative that intensifies the experience further by throwing even more aliens at you.)
Run-and-gunControl, meanwhile, is confined to just jumping up or down between platform levels and firing left or right. It’s immediate and delightfully simple, as well as wonderfully responsive - as long as you stick to the D-pad (could be me, but switching to analogue made it too easy to jump up/down by accidentally straying into diagonal inputs.)
But back to the enemies. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but also with differing attack methods. So some shuffle along the ground, changing levels, while others float around the stage, homing in on your position. Some fire back, some release more aliens when you shoot them, an alien spaceship occasionally flies vertically at either edge of the playfield… you get the idea.
Your alien targets also put up varying resistance to firepower. You begin with a ray gun but the power-ups soon appear - you get a three-way shot, rapid fire, or homing mini-missiles. These don’t last long, which adds to the overall frenetic pace, but you do get them frequently.
The point of all this variance, of course, is that it forces you to adapt strategically in order to total up the largest number of casualties while you have lives enabling you to do so (you start with three but can pick up more along the way).
Shoot, score!Casualties mean points, of course, and ultimately it’s what you end up playing the game for (you gain ‘medals’ for achieving set targets on each level - shooting down 100 flying aliens, for instance - but once those are done the marker becomes beating previous high-scores.)
And return you will, because
Alien Zombie Death is brilliantly executed and finely balanced stuff. It’s built on the classic PomPom foundation of relentless action, constant bullets, and countless exploding enemies.
And, typically, it doesn’t take long to sample this - begin a level, start shooting, and the screen is soon full of enemies, with you jumping down, moving left, sneaking up a level, blasting as you run backwards, dodging lethal energy fields (which, along with buzzsaws, appear in later stages), dropping into an alien gap and blasting back some room.
It’s frenzied, it’s manic, and it's so, so satisfying.
