Zombie&Lawn

Just when did zombies stop being monstrous, malevolent flesh-eating beasties and started acting as everybody's favourite target practice?

Zombie&Lawn, packed with scores of the aforementioned living dead, might just be the moment when things switched.

It's by no means the only title to make mowing down – this time quite literally – leagues of zombies its sole aim. There's a by-the-numbers quality to its gameplay, as if developer Enterfly fed music, characters and artwork into a supercomputer and out popped Zombie&Lawn.

The concept doesn't offer one bit of creativity, featuring zombies crawling out of the ground in what used to be a cemetery, now serving as your backyard. Your task is to clear the garden using a lawnmower to rip them to shreds.

Doing so is easy because main character Thomas is clamped to the mower at all times. You guide him around using a virtual analogue stick in the bottom-left, taking down enough zombies to clear the level before they swarm you and sap away at your health.

It's not long before a mob of zombies – some doing nothing more than wandering around aimlessly, others acting as suicide bombers – start to literally eat away your livelihood.

Rather than ploughing into them, success relies on your ability to take them out from behind. Run them down unawares and you're likely to be unharmed; but for every zombie you take down head-on, the greater the risk of being taken down yourself will be.

It's a set up that takes some getting used to, given that each and every zombie makes it their personal business to follow you. As soon as the screen fills with zombies, finding that elusive one with his back turned isn't quite so easy.

Zombie&Lawn attempts to ease the pain by offering upgrades and additional tools aplenty. Credits earned in each stage can then be used to up your health and defense or buy scores of add-ons and ammunition – missiles, mines and poison to name a few.

Rinse and repeat

The problem is Zombie&Lawn isn't all that entertaining.

Even with new weapons and upgrades, the game is a shallow case of using the boost button to bolt forward and take out a pack or two of zombies over and over again, retreating to safety in between each bout to wait for the next attack.

All the decoration in the world can't hide an uninspired, if inoffensive, set up. Zombie&Lawn feels like the result of a developer trying to tick boxes rather than piece together a title with any real sense of identity, purpose or drive.