With a name like that, you know it’s going to be good. Zombies is an Indie Game that’s a twin stick shooter… with zombies. And did I mention it’s only $1?

We all know that XBLA has no shortage of twin-stick shooters. Geometry Wars was available at launch and spawn so many clones and wannabes throughout the years. This is yet another one, but it knows it’s “yet another one” and decides to have some fun with it. You can tell from the title they aren’t taking it totally serious, and then the music kicks in with the singer screaming “I made a game with zombies in it” and other great lines such as “they shuffle from the side… you better shoot them or you will die” and “I made this with XNA.. it’s only $1 so I hope you pay.” The music is funny, and when my fiancee heard it playing she actually said “man, I need this on my iPod.”

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N 1T!!1

Just with any good twin-stick shooter there are a variety of enemies. You have your normal zombies, the fat zombies that are slower but take more shots to kill, green blobs that break up into smaller blobs as you shoot them, snakes that can only be killed by shooting them in the head, and angry faces. The last type of enemy I encountered were geometric shapes… I think we know why :) The game can also be played 1-4 players, which always extends the replay value of a game like this.   Now you can work together and try to get further before, or hey, maybe you want to see who of the 4 of you gets the highest score at the end of the game.  Do you help your buddies get the power ups, or do you horde them all to yourself.  It’s up to you and can add hours more of fun to the game.

To go along with the variety of enemies, there is a variety of weapons. You have your normal shot, a machine gun, laser, flame thrower, shotgun, rockets, and spread shot. You can also pick up power ups like a shield, extra lives, and speed up. In this game though, you can only carry one weapon at a time, so if you pick up a different weapon, you lose whatever ammo you had for the previous one. If you keep picking up the same weapon though it keeps increasing your ammo. As with a lot of games too, the powerups don’t stay on screen forever and they tend to show up in highly populated areas. So the decision is, do you go for the better weapon, or stick with what you have. This adds a bit of strategy to the game that keeps it interesting along with the every increasing difficulty.

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N 1T!!1 2

Unfotunately, it’s not all good in this game. For a game that is about getting high scores, it’d be really nice to have some Live Leaderboards, but unfortuantely it does not have any. I am not as familiar with the Indie Games, so I am not sure if this is a limitation of making games with XNA, or if it was just something they didn’t want to take the time for a game they only planned on charging $1 for. It does have local leaderboards at least.I do know that XNA is limited when it comes to online play, so I will not fault the game for lacking that. A minor complaint too is the way that it displays the number of lives you have remaining. I did not even realize that the game had it at first because my name XnocreativityX was too long and overlapped it. Minor, like I said, but it’s there.
Finally I saw another odd glitch where I paused the game and by default it was on “quit” and not “resume” so when I hit A to go back into the game, it quit the game. There was no “are you sure you want to quit” type option so I lost out on a good run there. At least with the new Indie Games setup they can now receive updates so let’s hope that these issues can be fixed. If they are I will update the review to reflect that. [UPDATE 8-21: I seems that it has not been saving my high scores after I quit the game either.  It will ask you where you'd like to save/load, but the next time I booted up the high score board was empty.  Is it just me?]

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N 1T!!1

Despite it’s flaws (which are rather minor in the grand scheme of things), I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!1 is a fun game that will suck away your time as you keep trying to get a better and better score. I am sure that it’s fun with other players as well, and really, for $1 you can’t go wrong with this game. Check out the trial and you get a nice taste of what the game has to offer and you’ll know if it’s for you, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Click Here to see the Xbox.com page for the game and add it to your download queue.

Thanks to GamingAngels for the pics until I can make some of my own.

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