Zombie Games are nothing new — they offer tons of fun usually involving slaying masses of zombies, not known to be the smartest enemies out there. A new downloadable-only title on Xbox 360 and PS3, Zombie Apocalypse, sets out to give players bite sized nuggets of zombie action, while remaining fun. Sad to say, the game fails to meet those goals. But it does a few things well.

Clearly inspired by Left 4 Dead and similar survival horror/zombie games, Zombie Apocalypse is set in a world where a disease has turned pretty much everyone but yourself into a zombie, and it’s your job to clear the mess, slaying thousands of brainless zombies throughout the campaign. It’s a third person/isometric perspective action game where you move with the left analog stick and fire your weapons with the right, and they’re basically the only two controls you’ll need, as you massacre your way through hordes of enemies. You’ll start off with a basic assault rifle, and then find more powerful weapons as you progress throughout the game.

The campaign consists of 55 missions, and while that sounds like a lot, it only amounts to around 3-4 hours. You can play the campaign alone or with up to three buddies, online or on the same console.
Because the 55 missions are set on only 6 or 7 maps, the running and gunning can get extremely tedious, constantly running on the same type of environments. You’ll encounter a variety of enemies and power-ups to fight the more powerful ones, but the gameplay always remains virtually the same. While you can select one from four characters, neither has any advantage over the other, besides looks, which is a shame, cause it seems the obvious way to add some more variety to the game.

Needless to say, both the gameplay and the action gets tiring an hour, and by completing the campaign you’ll mow-down at  least 15,000 zombies, in fact, it’s impossible to complete the game without killing at least 15,000 of them. All that killing, as you might expect, gets extremely boring. However, grinding through the game with a friend or two in the co-op mode is quite fun for a few hours.

Technically, the game features a decent next-gen look (or current-gen, actually); the effects and weapons are well displayed and the sounds of the action and the zombies fit the game well. However, the tedious gameplay and sheer onslaught of mindless enemies doesn’t offer much besides mindless grinding zombies away for hours. If you have a few friends who are Zombie fanatics, you might enjoy the game with them in co-op, but as a single-player experience, it’s rather shallow and will bore most very quickly.

The Good:
Fun co-op.
Good gameplay (for a while).

The Bad:
Quickly gets tedious.
No very smart.

Overall score: 6/10