Zombies & Me Lacks Brains: iPhone Game is a Little Too Simple

Zombies & Me seemed like such a good idea when I first read about it so I was excited to see that it had finally hit the app store. The basic idea of the game is that the end of the world is at hand. Zombies are attacking, whilst the air force is trying to bomb them. Fate has left you outside your grandmothers house without any kind of weapon.

You have three goals in this game - stay alive for as long as possible, draw the zombies away from grannie's house and try to lure the zombies into the path of falling bombs.

The graphics of the game go for cute rather than horror and are fairly basic. Visually it looks more like an old Gameboy game than something you might find on the iPhone. The playing area consists of a small patch of ground surrounding the house in the middle. Granny herself can be seen shouting funny little phrases from an upstairs window.

As soon as the game begins the zombies start appearing thick and fast. Maybe a little too fast, but more on that later. All you need to do is drag our hero using your finger on the touch screen. The random bomb drop zones appear as gradually shrinking yellow circles. If you can get the zombies to walk into these zones they become mesmerised by the falling bombs and are destroyed, but you have to be careful not to get caught in the bomb blast yourself as there is only one life per game.

The game is incredibly simple and that in itself is not the problem. Flight Control by Firemint is both one of the simplest and one of the most popular games in the App Store. The problem with Zombies & Me is that it simply isn't that fun. The game play starts off extremely quickly and everything moves much faster than I had expected making it much more of an exercise in mashing your finger around the screen as quickly as possible than developing any kind of strategy. Also, it doesn't really go anywhere. There is no respite or alteration to the game play and it quickly becomes repetitive. One of the great things about Flight Control was the urge to go back for "just one more game" after crashing. Zombies & Me is reasonably fun for the first two or three games but after that I just didn't have any interest in it.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh on a game that is, after all, only 99 cents, but there are so many 99 cent games that have so much more to offer these days, that 8lb Gorilla are going to have to up their game if they want to compete in iPhone game market.