Simply put, for anyone who is a fan of ragdoll physics simulators, castle defense games, flicking games or just plain hates zombies, GameDoctors has created the perfect game for you! ZombieSmash expertly blends elements of all these genres (and more) into a creative, gory and humorous game of survival, with stunning graphics and sound, and plenty of variety and replayability.
You play as Joey, a lone survivor pit against hoards of hungry zombies trying desperately to break into your house for a little grey-matter gazpacho. You must use your fingers to flick, smash, dismember and even bounce the undead until they are…well…”un-undead”. When you terminate a zombie, a star will appear, tap to collect these stars to purchase special weapon upgrades.
ZombieSmash contains a huge variety of zombies, each with special characteristics to keep you on your toes. In addition, there is a crazy assortment of 20 special (and or upgradeable) weapons daring to include such off the wall items as asteroids, wrecking balls, liquid nitrogen and even a cement block the size of a house! With a top-notch ragdoll physics engine, Game Doctor’s proprietary SplatterEngine™ (which “renders adorable cartoon blood and gore in a convincing and entertaining fashion“), stunning comic book-style graphics and a rockin original score and sound effects, ZombieSmash shows an amazing amount of polish and creativity.
As if the game’s large selection of weapons and zombie types were not already enough, GameDoctors decided to give you three game modes to choose from:
- Campaign Mode has two difficulty settings (normal and hard) and challenges players to survive for 31 days against an increasingly intense undead assault.
- Endless Siege Mode pits you against a literally never-ending zombie assault, and you must survive as long as possible.
- Sandbox Mode is a cool stress relieving tool where you get to play God (or perhaps Hades is more appropriate) and setup whatever scenario/onslaught you want, playing with the various weapons and zombie types that you’ve unlocked so far.
For players who want to brag about their zombie smashing prowess, GameDoctors has thought to include a wide variety of Social Networking features, including Chillingo’s Crystal for online leaderboards and achievements as well as the ability to take and share screenshots with all your friends on Twitter or Facebook.
The amount of care and attention to detail that obviously went into crafting this game is immediately evident and cool special effects and fine little details add to the game’s ambiance an appeal. For instance, when you kill the final zombie of a level you get a Mortal Kombat-style “FINISH HIM!!” request and a video camera view pops up, allowing you to have some additional fun performing your own “finishing move”, tossing the zombie (or perhaps just its head or leg) in slow motion.
Unlike other castle defense games, ZombieSmash does a nice job of alternating your point of view throughout the game to keep things fresh. At first you may need to defend the left side of your house, then all of a sudden things will slide over and you need to defend the right, finally you might need to fend off the undead from both sides at the same time (giving those thumbs a workout).
If we had to come up with one complaint regarding the ZombieSmash it’d have to be the lack of collisions between zombies. For instance, if you toss one zombie at another, they will just pass by one another with no interaction. We know that this was a conscious decision by the developer, but some zombie bowling with zombies as both the ball and pins would have been quite satisfying. On the other hand, we should mention that you can almost achieve this by picking up a fallen rock and tossing it at some oncoming zombies…so in the end, it’s all good!
In Conclusion
Sure, at its core ZombieSmash is a castle defense game, which means you’ll be in a finger-flicking frenzy! On the other hand, since it spans several genres, we suspect that even if you are sick to death of castle defense games or bored to tears by ragdoll physics sims, you’ll still be able to find some aspect of this game to enjoy. The graphics and aesthetics are absolutely gorgeous! ZombieSmash is an artfully crafted game with great lots of little details that you’d expect from seasoned developers, but which come as a pleasant surprise from this first-time indie development team. GameDoctors is definitely one studio to keep an eye on (though not literally of course).
For a little more background information about GameDoctors we recommend reading this recent article on Joystiq.
A Bunch of Screenshots
