Zombie Night Terror: Review

Gambitious Digital Entertainment Lucas
Zombie Night Terror is available now to help you get your fill of pixelated zombie gore. Developed by NoClip and published by Gambitious Digital Entertainment, this game is sure to interest those that remember the age old classic game 'Lemmings', but have grown up a bit in the process.

Zombie Night Terror is a side scrolling platform game where the controls are simplified to the arrow keys (or W,A,S,D) to move the camera around, and the mouse to point and click. The aim of the game is to kick start the zombie apocalypse by infecting or contaminating enough humans along the way.

The story is quite simple and engaging enough for the subject matter. A crazy scientist has formulated a makeshift drug which he has spread around to the unsuspecting general public. It soon becomes known that the first batch of drugs are a disaster and are turning people into zombies. To fix this, the scientist then creates another random batch of chemicals, which just makes things worse...or better depending on who you're rooting for. This upgrade to the drugs essentially give you new abilities for controlling your zombies.

The game play reminds me somewhat of the game Lemmings, where you are given a kind of god like overseer power as you watch the first zombie take down its first victim. The flow on effect goes from there but you, as the almighty being that you are, have the power to contaminate humans along the way when one of your zombie horde collect power ups. These power ups are scattered across the levels, which are made up of nightclubs, abandoned buildings and underground sewers. Once one of your zombies collect a power up, you will build up your arsenal in your tool bar at the bottom of the screen. For example, you may need to collect some syringes filled with the contaminant in order to infect more humans along the way.

Each level will present to you a minimum and a maximum goal to complete. You may need to only turn 15 people into zombies, but to get the max score, you might have to turn all of the humans into zombies without having any of your zombies killed in the process. So to do this you may need to use a zombie as a stop barrier to turn the brainless zombies around to stop them from falling to their death off the edge of a building, or you might have to sacrifice one of your walking dead in order to turn them into a bomb and blow away part of the wall to continue through.

Killing unarmed humans is as simple as allowing one of your walking dead to walk by them. They will automatically begin eating their victims in a display of horrid violence, all within the confines of pixelated visuals. Armed humans on the other hand are a different story altogether. Sending a lone zombie to take down a bouncer at a nightclub that is carrying a nightstick won't end well for the zombie. One swift blow to the head will end the zombie's life for the second time, but this time for good. The same goes for armed criminals and police. Basically, if the human is armed somehow, you will need to have your wits about you to get through unscathed. It's usually possible, but it might take some thinking and a few retries first.

As you progress through the game, naturally the puzzles get harder and harder to pull off which provides the necessary challenge to keep you interested and coming back to try and nail it. Also, as you venture further into the game you will be introduced to more and more mutations that can be applied to the zombies. It is these mutations that you will need to use to turn the odds in your favour to kill the humans and recruit them to your army of the dead. On top of the mutations, you also get the ability to combine these mutations together so that you can experiment your way through the levels until you achieve complete dominance.

In a nutshell, this is a puzzle game wrapped in a beautiful pixelated shell. It's quite amazing how they can make such a simple style of graphics looks so complex and beautiful. The game is predominantly presented in black and white, however it highlights the objects within the game with the likes of the red shine of spilled blood, and the green glow of the contaminants that litter the world.

Zombie Night Terror is a neat little package of a game. It manages to pack amazing animations into a heavily pixelated graphical style that has its own form of satisfaction that comes with it. The game play is relatable to other games which makes the retro feel of the interface feel like second nature. It's a simple formula at work here that achieves a lot of playability due to the multiple different solutions that are possible for a single outcome. Although the game starts off fairly easy to manage, the difficulty does appear to spike after the first few missions which would usually frustrate me to no end, however with Zombie Night Terror, I felt compelled to continue playing until I could get to the end. It won't be an easy journey, as the management of your horde becomes like a second and third job, but a game like this shouldn't be too easy. It's all about the challenge and getting your head around those seemingly impossible puzzles.


SCORE: 8 out of 10

Positives:
  • Smooth pixelly animation
  • Easy to use controls
  • Great use of an age old gaming concept
Negatives:
  • Predominantly black and white
  • Heavy difficulty spike after a couple of missions
Platforms: PC, Mac
Genre: Puzzle Platformer
Initial Release: Winter 2016
Developer:  NoClip
Publisher: Gambitious Digital Entertainment



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