Zombie Night Terror

Zombie Night Terror is probably best described as a lemmings-esk zombie infestation game, with your primary goal (assuming you're of the same mindset as I am) of biting and infecting as many humans as possible whilst completing the mission goals. The game has no direct control over the zombies, and just like willful lemmings they will simply walk towards whatever goal you have set for them or wander around the general area they are in. Whilst you have no direct control over them, the walking dead are surprisingly entertaining to control through other means, even more so when you are forcing them to self-destruct, causing blood and body parts to splatter across the screen in a meatboy styled explosion, taking out other zombies and humans in the blast radius. There are several "mutations" available that will periodically unlock as you progress throughout the game, giving you new abilities to unlock and that open up more gameplay elements and strategies. There does seem to be a very loose story from what I have played so far, but I'll leave you to explore that for yourself. Video options are simple, but to be honest with a game like this I didn't expect much. Full 4K support is a feature and the game should auto-detect your monitors resolution. A few other options I appreciated was the ability to automatically pause the game when I placed an overlord (a sort of mind-controlling zombie for the peasant zombies), the in built game time tracking and the ability to clear my save data within the game, something that is surprising missing from a lot of games nowadays. Controls are also fully rebindable (as far as I can tell) with the option of a secondary set of controls. So far I have enjoyed my brief time with it, and will most likely continue streaming it on a regular basis. The gameplay is a nice mix of challenge and excitement, wondering what each level will bring and how I can overcome it, not to mention the exploding zombies, did I mention that?

Zombie lemmings. Your whole horde can get wiped out by one or two guys with shotguns and the game demands a bit more control over them (grouping them, splitting into smaller groups, waiting for an adequate number to gather) than you actually have. Bonus goals can be too hard, but sometimes just reaching halfway the level becomes too difficult unless you do everything right at the right moment -restarting the whole level because you missed a beat kills the joy in this game. You feel like the designer's puppet. Only for masochists.

Instead of helping dumb lemmings survive perilous levels, your goal here is to help brainless zombies spread the zombie apocalypse. Zombie Night Terror takes the formula of the classic Lemmings games, improves the controls on some areas, and then applies a horror film flair. The game manages to keep things interesting through a combination of good mechanics, well-designed levels, and great atmosphere. The graphics are simplistic but manage to do a lot with the pixel graphics and extremely subdued (almost black-and-white) colour palette. The levels in the game are filled with lots of horror film cliché, tropes, and references, combined with some genuine humour. The action is reasonably fast-paced, which makes it more exciting than some similar games which have a very relaxing (sometimes boring) pace, but it also allows you to pause or speed up time at will, as needed, which helps to make it more about strategy than about split-second timing. My only complaint is that, while most of the levels give you an overview of a complex problem and let you plan an execute a strategy to over come it, quite a few of the later levels move away from that and devolve into more trial-and-error gameplay where you have little knowledge going in and have to work out how to progress by repeatedly failing, retrying, getting a little farther, failing, and repeating. If the quality of the levels in the last chapter had kept up with the quality of the first three, then it would have easily been a 5 star rating for me, but as it is I feel I need to subtract one for the annoying levels in that last chapter.

There are some fun levels at the beginning, and then later once you feel safe and are just enjoying yourself you discover that there are some levels (Most) that go way beyond the opposite. There is such thing as challenging, and then there's the levels of frustration that this game reaches. It's just one of those games that seems to be designed to make you throw your keyboard through your computer screen and scream "WHY!!!?!?!" into the ceiling. This game will make you so angry that your eyes might turn a little red and I highly doubt the devs will give you the antidote for that.

I was putting this of at first as a small game without a lot of depth. I was wrong. There is depth, humour and lots of cartoonish gore for you pleasure. I am surprised by how much time I spent with this title. Even if it gets frustrating at times, I just stop and the solution comes the next time I play it. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to be able to play a relaxing few minutes in between and still have a lot of depth in their games. A very rare achievement.