Madness Road review - Crossy Road meets vehicular zombie slaughter
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iOS
| Madness Road

It's fair to say that in the years following Crossy Road's release, the voxel art style and certain progression features have become a mainstay in mobile games.

Such is the case for Madness Road, a driving game that sees you trashing buildings and killing zombies by way of running into them with a truck.

It's light and breezy fun in bite-sized portions of gameplay, but its similarly light controls and rather basic progression can make the whole experience slightly frustrating.

We're all mad here

Madness Road throws you into straight into the mix, and simply sends you off on your merry way to ram zombies with every piece of your car.

You can play with one-thumb using a virtual joystick, or you can flip your phone on its side and tap the sides of the screen to handle steering.

Floaty virtual joysticks have never really worked for mobile games, and it's the same here – one slight wrong move and your car can veer off in a totally different direction.

The two-handed controls aren't much better either. Again, they're just that bit too sensitive, and require a level of precision that one doesn't normally associate with arcade games.

Get used to the controls, however, and Madness Road starts to pick up. Running down zombies and crashing into buildings is always going to be fun, after all.

Power-ups are thrown into the mix too, offering you a circle of knives surrounding your car, a sudden explosion, and some other surprises to help you deal with the zombie hordes.

Temporary insanity

It's all good clean fun, until it stops suddenly because your car has run out of fuel. What's worse is that, at this point, you've probably only been playing for about thirty seconds.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing – the bite-sized gameplay means you can easily dive in for a few minutes, kill a bunch of zombies, and leave without investing too heavily in the game.

But it's also frustrating how quickly that moment arrives, especially when you've finally found your flow. Being ripped out of the moment is incredibly irritating, and you won't be hugely tempted back for another run either.

Stick with it long enough and you'll start unlock cars Crossy Road-style, with a bubblegum machine spitting out a random vehicle when you feed it enough coins.

The cars do have some differences – more health and the like – but overall they still feel the same, and no matter how big their health bar, they just don't give you enough time to enjoy them.

Slightly peeved

Overall, Madness Road has some fun sounding ideas, but it doesn't quite pull them off. Driving around killing the undead is a sure-fire winner, but here it just feels frustrating.

Floaty controls mean you'll be fighting more with the car than the enemies, and even when you do get the hang of things, you'll almost immediately game over.

It's shallow and slightly annoying, and while you'll probably find some fun in it, don't expect this to change your life.

Madness Road review - Crossy Road meets vehicular zombie slaughter

There's certainly roads, but the only insanity you'll find in Madness Road is the floaty controls and shallow gameplay
Score
Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.