Zombies Ate My Friends

Zombie games are dime a dozen on nearly every platform. It seems as though these poster children of '80s entertainment have arisen from the grave once again to try and overrun the planet.

While some zombie games manage to shuffle into the mainstream and stay there, the majority just fall by the wayside like so much decomposing matter.

Those that do succeed tend to have a selling point - perhaps an emphasis on story or a tower defence structure. Glu Mobile has attempted to give Zombies Ate My Friends its own unique selling point, but the results are mixed at best.

State of emergency

Having created a customisable character, which can be further kitted out through the use of cosmetic in-app purchases, you're thrust into a strangely cartoony world of zombie survival.

IAPs explained In Zombies Ate My Friends, there are two main resources for you to spend your money on: Golden Skulls and Cash. Cash is primarily collected through scavenging, fighting zombies, finishing missions, and levelling-up. But you can also buy it if you need more for ammunition, clothes, repairs, and so forth. Golden Skulls, known as Gold in menus, is the premium purchasing currency. It's near impossible to come across easily, but you'll need it to buy new weapons and upgrades from the time-limited hobo salesman who's always on hand. The smallest purchase you can make is £3.99 / $6 for 1000 units of Cash or 100 Skulls. Things then ramp up a little as the highest purchase is £77.99 / $120 for 30,000 Cash or 3000 Skulls. To put that into perspective, it costs around 10 Gold for 10 units of energy. Alternatively, you can pay around 20 to 40 Gold for an early rare weapon.

Your first task is to rescue a fellow survivor and grab some supplies for your helicopter-enabled escape. This means venturing across town, defeating zombies on the way, and grabbing supplies from garbage cans too.

To do this, you'll be tapping on navigation arrows to traverse screens, tapping on zombies to initiate battles, tapping on menus to fight, and, ultimately, just tapping an awful lot. Even bigger fights, like boss encounters, require the same tap, tap, tap mechanic, and it becomes mundane rather quickly.

This is also true of how you progress through the story as all you ever seem to do is run back and forth through waves of zombies doing mundane and menial tasks.

While there's clearly an air of survival in the narrative and environments, the only pressure to survive that you'll find in the gameplay is the will to carry on.

Zombie fatigue

Still, it shouldn't really come as a surprise that Glu Mobile wants the focus to be on zombie-slaying - even if it does try to put this in the wider context of helping people.

Engaging in combat with the undead expends various units of energy depending on the type of attack you pick. It also causes your weapon to wear and supplies of ammunition to dwindle. All of this just increases the likelihood that you'll be spending money on in-app purchases.

And that's Zombies Ate My Friends in a nutshell. It's just a series of opportunities to spend money.

At first, you're regularly rewarded with Cash and XP, with the occasional Energy boost thrown in alongside the rare Gold Skull. As you can imagine, this fills you with a sense of progression and getting something for nothing. But it quickly fades.

This is probably not too much of an issue if you're a freemium regular. However, it's hard to find much of a reason to keep coming back to a game that essentially involves tapping menu buttons before being ferried onto another screen for more of the same.

There are some neat ideas on show here, such as timed events that see zombie hordes approaching if you fail to finish a mission in time - thus making your task harder.

But those more interesting gameplay perks, alongside the charming visuals, are all overshadowed by a rather oppressive and unintuitive freemium system. This is a game about mindless, indiscriminately consuming drones that apparently wants to be played by them too.