After playing Zombie Drive only a few times, it’s easy to see the potential that exists, but it’s hard to understand why it wasn’t fully realized. I wish I could review the game based on the fact that it brings back grand memories of my hours spent running people over in Carmageddon, but I can’t. Zombie Drive feels more like an entertaining tech demo than a fully playable game.
Everyone loves to destroy zombies, I have heard it’s actually a national past time. Zombie Drive has the simple concept of you as the wheelman of a hot rod running over zombies. The story goes a little something like this. A city has been infested with zombies and the army has barricaded the entire city with you in it. The objective is to take out as many zombies as possible within the allotted time. The gameplay is very easy to grasp. The camera is stationary in the standard behind the vehicle view and the player steers by tilting the iPhone/iPod touch. Tilt it forward to go, back to reverse and side to side to steer. It takes a little getting used to especially if you haven’t used the accelerometer before in a driving game, but it’s much more entertaining than buttons.
The iPhone/iPod Touch is able to display quite a few zombies on the screen at a time but there are some framerate issues. The game becomes a little jerky in the beginning but once it gets going, everything seems to smooth out. The draw distance becomes a bit of a problem in the game. The developers have done a decent enough job with it, but when the car is at full speed, it requires quick reflexes to swerve and hit a zombie or avoid ramming into a building. Most of the buildings and enemies pop in fairly close to the vehicle so it’s difficult to get a good zombie killing combo going. The graphics themselves aren’t bad at all for a somewhat open environment style driving game. When a player hits a pile of zombies, the screen is splattered with blood and zombie juice, a nice added effect. The car and zombie textures look sort of muddy along with the grass located in the middle of the city. The game is intended to feel dark and dirty, but it lacks detail.
The music and voice acting in the game is inspiring, I hope more developers put this kind of effort forth in the future. It seems that the developers at Fuel Industries had more fun with the voice acting and music than creating the rest of the game. The background music has lots of guitars and drums which creates an appealing ambiance for a zombie killing game. The voice actor has a deep voice that randomly chimes in when you destroy a zombie with phrases like “that one was ripe” which is just good clean humor. When it comes to mobile gaming, the audio has always been sub-par, so I have to applaud Fuel Industries for giving it more effort.
With all of the good comes a hefty amount of bad. The title screen has three options, play now, controls and view credits. No high score system, no car selection, no city selection and the list goes on. What you see is what you get. I am aware this is a bargain bin title but I would gladly pay a few dollars more for the implementation of these features. I would have liked more variety, even some customization of the controls. For example, there needs to be a setting where you can change the default point of acceleration, not only in this game but in all iPhone/iPod Touch games. Games that utilize the accelerometer need a starting point, by default the developer wants the player looking down at the iPhone/iPod Touch. What if you want to enjoy the game lying down on your back? Well, you can’t and that’s disappointing. The game ends with a screen showing the highest combo and the amount of zombies killed. It then rates you based on these statistics with a simple scoring system. The problem here is the game doesn’t have a leaderboard or even a high score that retains from the last play. You start over every time the game is launched.
Zombie Drive is fun in short spurts. It isn’t deep and enthralling but it does give a feeling of joy when running over zombies and maybe that’s all we need. The game has been submitted to the App Store so we should be seeing it soon enough and for $0.99, it won’t be bad deal as long as Fuel Industries see it through to the end. If there are future updates to add more content this could end up being a must have title at such a low price. As it stands however, it is fairly short and unsatisfying.
Overall: 5.5 out of 10
Killing zombies can be insanely fun, so it’s a shame the developers didn’t get it right here.
There is always room for future updates.
Just got word from the developers that this one has been pulled from the App Store. They would like to rework a few things it sounds like to make the game more complete. This is just fantastic, glad to see developers taking input from internal and external sources. I will keep you updated when it Zombie Drive will return, hopefully with a brand new review!