Zombie Invasion

There's a fair chance that if a horde of zombies suddenly started clawing its way through your door right now you'd probably make a bolt for it. Assuming you aren't so addicted to Pocket Gamer that you don't try and finish reading this review first, or daring enough to try and record your dead-man-walking encounter on your mobile phone for a YouTube upload once the zombie apocalypse has passed.

Reading enthusiasts and daredevils aside then, chances are you're not going to stand around waiting to be taken down. Your average zombie might not have much pace, but they don't tend to give up easily. It's that slow and inexorable procession towards you from all angles that makes them so menacing.

Zombie Invasion conjures that feeling by leaving you to fend for yourself against a score of zombies. Delivered via canny mini-chapters that split play into days, the game has you standing motionless at the bottom of the screen, with zombies crawling in from the outer edges.

Your sole job is to shoot them down by simply tapping them as they appear on screen, with shots firing out at each zombie you touch. There's no need to aim at a specific body part and you don't have to reload – you just tap and the game fires.

You do this using a relatively small array of weapons - handgun, grenades, shotgun, and revolver - to fight off the impending threat of zombies trudging their way towards you. That is, essentially, your only motivation and your only action.

While Zombie Invasion is all about protecting your village from the bloodthirsty masses, in real terms it boils down to tapping the screen rather frantically.

There's no escaping the fact that you're massively outnumbered, even from the start, and your days are most certainly numbered. There will still be those who find play a little bit simplistic, however.

Survival-horror stalwarts have made an art of placing restraints on either your view or the speed at which you can aim your gun, purposefullly building in tension that fuels frustration. Zombie Invasion, however, takes a far more direct approach.

It's a case of tapping until you can tap no more. As more and more zombies surround you, targeting becomes extremely important both in what you choose to shoot and precision.

Balancing your defence against two different types of zombies – one the slow, lumbering type that form the bulk of the population, and another a dashing threat that make a break straight for you - gives the game a tactical edge. Honing in on the fastest foes seems smart, but may leave their slower counterparts free to rally greater numbers.

This makes Zombie Invasion about nothing more than survival, with points being awarded for every zombie you take down and your final tally being uploaded to a worldwide score board.

The game's setting is effectively meaningless and even the presence of zombies is nothing more than mere decoration; the developers could easily have plumped for a group of slow trawling tanks in a war zone instead (a la fellow iPhone title Blitz) or a viruses swarming towards your body's defences (as portrayed in Virus).

Nevertheless, its tap-happy nature and affordability make Zombie Invasion an entertaining enough play. It just might break the iPhone's record for taps-needed-per-minute, which is probably enough to convince most that tumbling with the living dead is worth a small investment – at least while you're still in the land of the living.