[PC] Zombie Driver Review

[mightbe]

Zombie Driver Review

Title: Zombie Driver
Platform: PC (Steam)
Developer: EXOR
ESRB: Rating Pending
MSRP: $9.99 on Steam
Editor: Rob 'mightbe' Schuster

What's Hot: Wholesale beautiful bloody carnage; devastating weapons; $10 price tag
What's Not: Lack of a map during the levels; low quality intro and ending cinematics; only 17 levels

Zombie Driver is the latest offering from the small Polish developer EXOR studios that attempts to combine the fun of a top down driving game with everyone's favorite apocalypse scenario, a zombie outbreak. Not only will you be able to plow through wave after wave of squishy moaning hoards, you'll be able to mount a variety of guns to one handful of different vehicles to aid you in your quest to rescue the last few batches of survivors from various points throughout the city.

Slamming the nitro button on a police car to turn waves of zombies into red smears is as fun as you'd expect.

You start off with a humble taxi cab, but you won't be stuck in it for long as you'll soon have a stable of bad ass rides to choose from. After all, what makes a zombie apocalypse without a 48 passenger bus mounted with rail guns? Driving is fun and easy to master with the addition of a hand break that will allow you to spin donuts and swoop sideways to inflict more damage. The game does a great job of quickly teaching you what items you can collide with and thankfully, though the environments are crowded, few things impede you progress and only enemies can actually damage your car. It's truly a satisfying experience to have the road to yourself and run down anything that gets in you way.

Unfortunately, there's very little creativity in objectives. For the game's short 17 levels, which took me about four and a half hours to finish, you're either clearing out a pack of infected from an area or killing a group of zombies outside of a building to rescue survivors and take them back to your safe-house. Some bonus objectives tie timers or body count limits to the list but it's ultimately a fairly one dimensional set of challenges.

Everyone aboard the magic bus! Ok, maybe only the people who aren't shambling about and moaning "BRAAAINS".

Though your main method of accomplishing goals may be to turn the undead into bloody messes, there's a handful of very satisfyingly destructive weapons to help you accomplish your goal. Unfortunately the ammo on these is limited and you can only have one equipped at a time, so you're likely to kill most shambling monstrosities with your car bumper. It would have been nice to even be allowed to carry both nitro fuel and a weapon, but sadly even the juice that makes you boost counts as a weapon.

Zombie Driver's interface and sound are very utilitarian and dripping with the dark pulp comic tone that the game revels in. As you run down your mindlessly aggressive adversaries, you'll be greeted with a satisfying combo readout and be rewarded with pleasant chimes and stacks of cash for how many zombie kills you can string along in a short period of time. With all that's going on in your environment, you'll want to keep track of the biggest danger to your mobile death machine bulbous exploding corpulent zombies. Thankfully they're easy to spot at lower speeds and as long as you can keep your car from getting swamped with zombies you can use their self destructive tendencies to your advantage by triggering them to wipe out tightly grouped enemies.

When I call for "Medic!" I want an ambulance with rockets to come to my aid.

The in-level visuals are both gruesome and gorgeous at the same time. Whether it's a flaming wall of undead creeping toward you or the flying bits of freshly rail-gunned flesh rippling out from your latest shot, there's a certain beauty in skillfully rendered mayhem that's inescapable. Sadly, the intro and ending movies are muddy stills cobbled together that just don't fit well with the rest of the visual polish that the game has going for it.

Other annoying bits that stand out are the complete and total lack of a map. The HUD does a good job of pointing the way to your objectives and safe house, but doesn't even give you a mini-map or full screen map to help you plan ahead your route past the edges of your screen. The camera is often times a limiting factor once you reach the fastest levels of vehicle upgrades. You'll many times find yourself impaling an exploding zombie on the hood of your ride before you even have time to react, much to the determent of your armor plating. The only real way to manage the later levels is to slow down, cramping the pacing of the game and sucking the fast paced fun right out of it.

For all it's flaws, you can't deny the inherent fun in vaporizing zombies with a rail gun.

Zombie Driver puts you behind the wheel of the world's deadliest cars in the classic style of a top down driving game souped up with modern touches. What it lacks in length, depth, and polish, it goes a good way to making up for it in intense bouts of tire squealing and the satisfying crimson rain of body parts.

Score: 3 out of 5 CoGs


Rob says, "A solid gameplay experience in a decidedly retro genre is hampered slightly by its brevity and the lack a few creature comforts like a mini-map."

[BLeeP]

Nice review. I will most definitely grab it when it inevitably hits five dollars or less on good ole Steam. It could be fun just to try and grab all of the achievements.

[mightbe]

The achievements are mostly unlocked in the progression of doing the missions plus secondary objectives. Map 16 is the best place to grab the 3k zombie kills though, just a heads up.

[Suave Peanut]

Yeah I would totally get this if it showed up as a midweek/weekend deal.

[Hotcod]

I've been enjoying it but i'd advice waiting for some kind of sale to knock the price down a little bit at which point it will be a really fun little distraction

[Spectre-7]

Reading that gave me a mad hankering for Quarantine. Wonder if I can find my disk.

Oh, and small suggestion: "A solid gameplay experience in a decidedly retro genre" -- genera is the plural of genus.

Cheers!

[mightbe]

Thank you Spectera!

[Purple Santa]

Originally Posted by Katslover

Nice review. I will most definitely grab it when it inevitably hits five dollars or less on good ole Steam. It could be fun just to try and grab all of the achievements.

I think i'm on the "wait till a price drop happens" to buy also.

Does look like a fun distraction though...thanks for the review Mightbe.

[Wilkz07]

good review. i picked it up last weekend and have only played a couple of levels (using the limo at the moment). It took me a little while to get the hang of the controls and driving top down, also where to pick up weapons.

very fun, very violent.

[AniAko]

Excellent review Rob

[roboninja]

Nice to see this review. I was pondering in the Steam thread about this game just last week. I think I'll wait until a $5 sale to pick it up, but it sure sounds like decent fun. Might help scratch that Carmageddon itch I've been having

[Ghostbear]

Good news, this game is only $2.50. Today only on steam.

[AniAko]

Just picked it up, thanks for the heads up GB

[TrackZero]

Picked this up for $5 on Steam. Awesome little title. Great review as well Rob. Though I'll disagree with you on the end-game forcing you to slow down due to the exploding zombies. If you've got the hand-eye coordination, there's no problem.

[JayK47]

I was hoping the game would allow you to pick any level and replay it after beating it or having some sort of free play.

[mightbe]

If you still haven't got a copy, it's back on sale for $5 just about everywhere and has been updated with a new game mode.

[Wasson_]

SURE why not...throw another one on the pile.