OMG Zombies!
Review
A fun little ride on the gore train
by Preston Dozsa
reviewed on PC
The slightest impact
In your typical zombie flick/game, you shoot a zombie in the head in order to put it down. No ifs, ands or buts. It's the head or nothing. But in the beginning of an outbreak, no one knows this fact. So people will waste countless rounds shooting zombies in the torso in the hope that they will die and stop their relentless assault. And this is why most of humanity dies off very quickly during a zombie apocalypse.
In OMG Zombies!, it doesn’t take a headshot to put down a zombie. Any part of the body will do, because the moment they get hit, zombies explode. As in, their chest balloons outwards and their innards go flying in every direction around them. Which, incidentally, causes other zombies to explode into mush and hurt everything around them. Instead of taking out single zombies one by one, you’re mowing down crowds of zombies with a single shot.
Which begs the question: How the hell did humanity not stop an outbreak where zombies explode at the slightest impact?
Chain reaction
OMG Zombies! is essentially a puzzle game in which you try to clear the screen of objects with a limited number of moves. In this case, the objects are the mindless horde of zombies and the moves are the bullets in your rifle. Whenever a zombie is shot, they explode and cause other zombies near them to undergo the same fate, essentially creating a giant chain reaction that hopefully takes out most of the zombies on a map. Of course, if that was all there was to OMG Zombies!, we would have a very bland game. And thankfully, it is a little bit more complicated than that.
Aside from the traditional zombies of yore, there are also seven different other types of zombies that each have their own special attributes. For example, the cop zombie fires a bullet in a straight line upon death, while the mortar zombie’s head flies off like a rocket and explodes elsewhere on the map. In a way, the zombies are their own worst enemies, in that they harm each other far more often when they die than you do while you’re alive. This causes each of the games 100 levels to be approached from a different angle, and provides some variety where there otherwise would not be.
When you finish each level, each of which take roughly a minute at most to complete, you receive a medal rank that will give you cash to buy upgrades. These upgrades allow for you to deal even more damage against zombies, but they also allow you to increase the number, range and power of the various special abilities of the zombies themselves! There are about ten upgrades or so for each zombie upgrade path and it will take a lot of playtime if one hopes to max out every skill.
Bare bones
For all I’ve just written on OMG Zombies!, the actual gameplay - despite all the variations and depth that I’ve talked about - essentially comes down to playing the same level repeated 100 times over. You shoot zombies three to six times each level, they explode and hopefully by the end you’ve killed them all. There’s no additional modes beyond this, and after completing 60 levels I grew a bit bored with the game. There’s no story to latch onto, and it is really a bare bones game.
Aesthetically, the graphics are nothing to write home about, yet the black and white tone combined with the massive amounts of red gore that appears on screen does set the atmosphere to one that is appropriately bloody. The sound effects within the game add to this as well, as nearly every action you take will result in a queasy ‘squish’ sound that really nails the schlock horror that the game attempts to be like. My one complaint is that the main menu music is very annoying and grating, and I rushed to select each level just so I didn’t have to listen to the annoying tune.
Gore train
OMG Zombies! is a competent and bloody puzzle game that manages to be entertaining despite its simple structure. It may grow old on you quickly due to a lack of variety in the game modes, but for what it is worth the game is a fun little ride on the gore train.
6.5
fun score
Pros
Bloody fun, Nice variation in puzzles
Cons
Lack of variety in game modes, annoying menu music
