Loads of balls out fun!
The Bad: Repetitive music. Short. Car explosions that serve no strategic value. Low production value, for those that care about that over gameplay.
Thanks to a recent never ending spate of zombie games, not to mention a million zombie mods available for free on Fileplanet.com, the genre is getting more stale than granny's year-long unwashed knickers. For me, even Valve's bestselling Left 4 Dead series wasn't enough to revitalize the genre because of an almost non-existent storyline element, incredibly repetitive gameplay, and simplistic level designs. Now we have Zombie Driver, a game that could be just another ill attempt at mimicking games in a genre that deserves to be more dead than the subject matter it depicts. On the other hand, maybe it's something different, coming from relatively lesser known EXOR Studios, the independent game company based in Szczecin, Poland who brought the endearing D.I.P.R.I.P. Warm Up to the Steam community in 2008. Let's take a closer look.
Having practically adopted a new personal mantra: "If it's not Alan Wake, Kill it," I was reluctant to even take a second look at Zombie Driver till I managed to get a hold of some pre-release screenshots. The gameplay video reminded me so much of Steve Jackson's old RPG game Car Wars that I took a chance on this one for $8.99 pre-order price on Steam delivery system. There hasn't been a Car Wars game since 1985 when Autoduel came out for the Commodore 64 so I couldn't resist trying Zombie Driver out.
It's hard to play the game without being reminded of the original GTA, but despite the fact that this is a top down view with a slight rear angle, this game a full polygon game, with up to date, although slightly unpolished graphics. The game is definitely a small production game. Someone expecting a high budget production and intensely tuned graphics like what we see in something like Crysis or Batman: Arkham Asylum is going to be sorely disappointed, but in defense of EXOR Studios this game was about classic video game fun, not eye popping graphics.
There are six different cars to choose from. Each car has different stats and handles very differently. Each car has armor, ramming capability, and speed, all of which can be upgraded as you acquire money throughout the game. It's going to be largely preference about which car a player chooses to use, however, each car holds a different number of passengers. Capacity often becomes the deciding factor about which vehicle to use on a particular mission. So on quite a few missions you have almost have no choice but to use the largest capacity vehicle or else get stuck making several trips back to town and using up valuable time.
The clock gives enough time to get back to town between rescues but it would be necessary to race back as fast as possible and you really wouldn't be able to focus at all on killing zombies or collecting money. Given there's only one vehicle that has a capacity of larger than 6, the player would have more choice over resources on missions where there are rescues spread out over multiple locations if the clock actually stopped between each rescue with the requirement that the player to return to base and other rescue locations become actually deactivated until the player unloads.
Zombie Driver gives us an adequate selection of weaponry . Most of the weapons are fairly standard, but the nitro does add for some unusual game play. Still, I would like to have the ability to collect all weapons at the same time and switch when I felt like it. In this case the designers chose to go with the power up system more like back in the days of old school Defender where once you grab a weapon you have it till either you find another weapon or the current weapon runs out.
The storyline is actually inventive, even if downplayed and somewhat underutilized because of the nature of the engine. We only get the story by way of briefings between missions and we have to use some imagination because the game engine doesn't really allow for too much expression of the storyline.
It's a fairly easy game, but any more difficult might get annoying with this sort of game. With that said, from start to finish it probably affords only about 3-4 hours of playtime, but with the relatively inexpensive release price I suppose you can't really ask for more. I'm not sure how friendly the game is for modding. If it's mod friendly, it seems like almost every game is these days, it may offer more sustained entertainment in the long run.
The actual map well designed, containing many destructible elements, although buildings are not destructible. There are also plenty of cars strewn about the map, which explode when you ram them. I believe I saw a tip in the game at some point that you can use the cars to explode zombies, but the explosion radius is far too small to be of any use in killing zombies and they are rarely found in roads or areas where the zombies are located so it's really unrealistic to use utilize explosions from the automobiles in any way. I did find that to be a minor weakness in the game.
Another weakness of the game is that it has great music, but very little of it. There are basically two loops that play depending on whether you are on a mission or in briefing. It would be more interesting if the loop would change occasionally at least giving the illusion there are more songs.
The bottom line is that this game is all about fun. It tries to bring back some of the old school feeling of excitement we used to get during the early days of classic video gaming. There are plenty of zombies to shoot and smash in exciting ways. There is a frantic pace to the game and a neat city to race around in and explore. For those like myself who are really tired of zombie games, this one, despite the name, really isn't that much about zombies. You could substitute anything in there, giant ants, foreign invaders, aliens, and it would play the same. It's an extremely ambitious game that brings together a combination of what may be mostly previously implemented elements, but with Zombie Driver EXOR Studios brings them together into a unique gaming experience, one that is well worth playing, especially at a bargain basement release price of $9.99. Zombie Driver deserves at least a 7.5 out of 10.