An easy yet fun ride through endless hordes of undead.
Two years after Alien Shooter came his big brother, Zombie Shooter (2007), by the same company. Instead of killing aliens, you'll go through endless hordes of flesh eaters' stereotypes from those gory Horror flicks, known best as the undead. Naturally, there is a good variety of living dead that isn't limited to transformed humans, as you'll fight against mutated dogs, rats and huge abominations with heavy arsenal.
If you're into the zombie stuff, you'll notice that Zombie Shooter doesn't try to set the player in a real zombie apocalypse. In this Isometric Action game, you just visit several places overrun by the undead and blast them with the most powerful gun available. It's exactly like Gauntlet with a different setting. There is no survival tactics such as camping in a safe house and blocking entrances; you just need to be quick enough to take down the zombies before they kill your character.
But don't thing that Zombie Shooter sucks. In truth, it's quite a fun game that, even being short and pretty easy, you'll find that your money was well spent. In this single player-only game, you have several gameplay options to enjoy. First of all, you'll want to start in the campaign mode, which is a sequence of levels that become harder and harder as you progress towards the end. You can choose between a male and a female character and give a name for your avatar. Playing with the guy will give you extra health and weight capacity, so you can carry more ammunition for your weapons. Although the male character sounds appealing, my choice was the female one, which gives an important advantage in damage dealt and movement speed.
These starting attributes may be upgraded during the game, as you kill more monsters and level up after beating a map. At the end of each level you'll be able to buy new weapons and equipment with the money your earned. After acquiring your favorite weapon, you can stick with it by upgrading its power up to three times as well buying new guns that suit better in a given situation. The rule "the bigger, the better" applies in most situations, although the last two guns aren't exactly as devastating as someone would presume. Personally I liked the upgraded laser gun, so my efforts since the beginning of the game were to buy it later on. If you spend too much money with every weapon in sight, you may find yourself weak in the later maps because you can't upgrade the real powerful stuff.
The equipment is actually three types of armor and some miscellaneous items such as medkits, night vision and flying support bots. Naturally your best friend is the protection, so you may want to spend some cash on heavy armor when there're too many ranged enemies in a level. If you die you'll spawn somewhere near your body and lose a life, which can be bought for a price or acquired during the fights.
As you can see the game gives a little sense of freedom by allowing the player to upgrade weapons and attributes of his/her character without a particular order. At the end you'll either finish the game with a fast and accurate marksmen or a brute avatar that can take the hardest blows and keep moving. This encourages the player to replay the game and try different character builds.
The enemies in Zombie Shooter are, as you would expect, mindless and dangerous. You can't simply throw yourself in a group of flesh eaters and kick their ***es like Rambo. It's mostly a good idea to keep your avatar distant enough and fire against them in a safe place, especially because there're a lot of melee zombies in the bestiary. But be prepared for mutated monsters that uses laser rifles and explosive guns, and they usually use their allies as shields while you try to blast them out. However, since your weapons are really overpowered, it's possible to take down an entire horde of zombies with just a few shots. Although it's quite easy to do so, you'll probably find entertaining when every zombie in the screen explodes and spread the blood all over the place.
When I say "horde", I mean that you'll be fighting against more than fifty monsters at the same time. Each level has an objective that, after triggered, summons a lot of zombies simultaneously. Your job is to take down them all and find the exit door. It's that simple. Unfortunately the levels end pretty quickly and the game becomes incredibly easy after getting an upgraded heavy gun. If that wasn't enough, you'll sometimes find power-ups that make your character invincible for a short period of time. Some other power-ups are dropped from your slain enemies, which will upgrade one of your guns, give you a medkit or even a heavy armor! Considering these bonuses you'll find that even your money will accumulate as there isn't anything to spend cash on anymore.
After beating the campaign two or three times and trying the hardest difficulty setting, you may want to try some other gameplay mode. You can play a very arcade-like game called Gun Stand, which you must control a powerful mechanic gun and kill all the incoming zombies, and the difficulty increases as the time passes. There is no victory in sight, you just take down as many zombies as you can until they destroy your turret, so your name will appear in the high score screen. A similar yet better mode is the Survival, which puts the player in the middle of a large open arena, killing all the enemies that spawn at the edge of the screen. The difficulty progresses until it gets impossible and you die hopelessly, also to set your score amongst the best players.
As you can see it's a thin content for a solo-only game, but Sigma Team didn't want to make a big release like Shadowgrounds Survival (2007, Frozenbyte). You may face Zombie Shooter as a house game, just for fun. The 2D graphics and sound fit perfectly well and, if the game was a bit longer and harder, it would be considered a major release. But it's very good in the way it is and will certainly entertain the player looking for some nice mindless zombie slaughtering.