Game Reviews

Zombie High Dive

Star onStar onStar halfStar offStar off
|
iOS
| Zombie High Dive
Get
Zombie High Dive
|
iOS
| Zombie High Dive

What possesses a person to decide that dropping head-first into a small pool of water from 20 metres up is a good idea?

There has to be a certain level of stupidity there, surely. Or maybe just a complete disregard for one's mortality.

Perhaps that explains why the participants of Zombie High Dive are so fearless in their exaggerated brand of high-diving. They're already pretty brainless, as well as entirely dead.

The balking dead

Zombie High Dive is a bit like Angry Birds flipped 90 degrees.

Rather than pulling back and pinging your character at a target along a horizontal plane, here you're flinging it up into the air and letting gravity do the rest.

The target is a paddling pool at the bottom, but there are plenty of things to busy yourself with on the way down.

For one thing, there's the required diving pattern set before each jump. This involves a certain number of flips and a prescribed type of entry into the pool (either head or feet-first).

You can replicate this by simply holding the screen when in mid-air, which will cause your zombie to tuck its legs in and spin. Release to straighten out and slow your spin.

Smashing and splashing

In addition, certain rounds require you to smash stuff on the way down. This being a wacky take on high diving, there are assorted boxes, bottle, weights and the like dotted either side of your path, and as long as your character lands in the pool you can take a fairly elaborate (and painful) path to the big splash.

It's all pretty entertaining stuff, for the first few goes. Pretty soon though a mixture of repetition and frustration kicks in. You're essentially doing the same thing time after time, and when you have to be so precise with many of the jumps, you'll often fail.

You can bribe the undead judges with biscuits (of course) to earn you another go, but those are finite. Similarly, an irritating ticket system allows you limited access to consecutive levels.

Tickets recharge after 20 minutes, but the prompt to spend some money on IAPs is pretty clear.

Caught on video

Even if you find that easy to resist, you'll be annoyed by the constant drip of unstoppable video ads in between every level.

The developer obviously realises that there are issues here, as booting up the game now brings up a message assuring us of a forthcoming update with "less ads" and "simpler gameplay."

All in all, Zombie High Dive throws some entertaining shapes in the air, but it's not too long before it lands wide of the target.

Zombie High Dive

A colourful and briefly entertaining but ultimately repetitive and irritating freemium physics game
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.