Game Reviews

Zombie Pizza

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| Zombie Pizza
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Zombie Pizza
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| Zombie Pizza

Zombies wouldn't be remotely scary if it weren't for their culinary appetites. The undead are all about fresh food, so it actually makes perfect sense to cater to these cannibalistic food critics in an effort to keep yourself off the menu.

The salaciously imaginative new iPhone game from Appy Entertainment takes exactly this approach, and puts you in charge of a fast-food joint (perhaps that should be slow, shambling food?) catering to the gory tastes of the living dead.

Locked inside your pizza shop, zombies are pressed against the door hoping to get a taste of flesh. To keep them at bay, your task is to feed them grisly pizzas, topped with eyeballs, guts, hearts, bones, brains and the most disgusting ingredient of all, broccoli.

A fast-moving conveyor belt carries the ingredients around the raw pizza base for you to grab and place on top of the dough to make specific recipes from your chef's cookbook. Each pizza requires specific combinations of ingredients, which must be ordered in a specific way to meet with Chef Zomboni’s gruesome guidelines.

Creating a simple Road Kill pizza, for instance, involves a mixture of four different ingredients. A Gut Buster, however, is cooked from four of the same ingredient, and offers a triple score bonus given that it's much trickier to put together. The second your pizza is ready it must be flung out of the door before the zombies’ hunger gets the better of them and they crash through the window to eat the chef.

Zombie Pizza is a very fast-moving puzzle game, though its extreme simplicity makes it immediately accessible and insanely entertaining. Superb graphics and a top-notch B-movie styling really draw you into the zombie feeding frenzy, and although the game doesn't really change as you work your way through the levels, the core gameplay is easily entertaining enough to carry the concept all the way.

Where the game is lacking is in its connectivity. Not that it particular needs multiplayer – it's not that kind of game – but some kind of online leaderboards are something of a prerequisite these days for games with a point scoring purpose. With an option to dangle your successes in the face of friends, Zombie Pizza would likely have landed itself an extra point.

Regardless, Zombie Pizza is likely to become one of those great, bite-sized (sorry) iPhone titles that the pocket gaming world will devour with an unrelenting hunger, and will join the likes of Flight Control and Pocket God as a permanent fixture on your homepage.

Zombie Pizza

Insanely simple, and simply insane, Zombie Pizza is an impressive mix of bad taste and great gameplay that’s as addictive to casual pocket gamers as brains are to zombies
Score
Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.