Zombie Attack

Zombies are a brilliant entertainment tool. They provide a storytelling and gameplay element that's at once dangerous and threatening, and yet allow the protagonists to go on a rampage of massacre and mayhem and still come out morally clean.

So it's a shame to see games like Zombie Attack reduce the impact of such a superb and well established enemy by filling their guts with green gore. Zombies are supposed to explode like a bin liner filled with pasta sauce that's being dropped off the roof of a block of flats. Any liberties taken with this beloved breed of adversary diminishes the whole experience.

And considering that Zombie Attack is already mired in a swamp of awkwardly translated waffle in place of its storyline, it really doesn’t need to shackle its characters to a child-friendly radiator. But ultimately these are quite superficial issues, and although they might detract from the overall experience, the gameplay is thankfully solid.

Zombie Attack puts you at the latter end of an undead apocalypse, stranded in the middle of nowhere with a horde of flesh eaters lumbering toward you. Rather surprisingly, given that it's a character-based game with isometric graphics, it occupies a space on the fringes of the third person shooter genre.

The ghouls are staggering toward you, but you stand your ground - shooting them down before they make it to your stranded vehicle and injured, tasty buddies. Rather than running around the place, you simply move a crosshair around the immediate vicinity, targeting the nearest zombies and blasting away until the short time limit hits zero.

You’re then given the option of upgrading your weapons depending on how many points you’ve earned, before your rag-tag bunch of survivors moves on to the next area and comes face-to-face with an increasingly savage pack of the undead.

What Zombie Attack really needs is a careful refinement of its production and presentation, to ensure it doesn’t have such a camp and low quality cloud hanging over the high octane, invigorating gameplay. But as long as you skip through the reams of text, you'll find a very entertaining and unusual shooter (swimming in entertaining blood) waiting for you.