As zombies become an increasingly common fixture in casual games, it was only a matter of time until a cute, marketable version of the shambling horde made its way to Facebook. Zombiees! is a text RPG that casts you as a college student trying to fight his or her away across campus during a zombie outbreak. You can complete missions by fighting your way through different types of rotting college-students-turned-undead like hipsters and geeks, or head into the Zombie Fight Club to pit your own personal horde of friendly zombies against rival hordes.
As zombies become an increasingly common fixture in casual games, it was only a matter of time until a cute, marketable version of the shambling horde made its way to Facebook. Zombiees! is a text RPG that casts you as a college student trying to fight his or her away across campus during a zombie outbreak. You can complete missions by fighting your way through different types of rotting college-students-turned-undead like hipsters and geeks, or head into the Zombie Fight Club to pit your own personal horde of friendly zombies against rival hordes.
Zombiees! makes heavy use of art and graphical interface elements to try and liven up the game. You take on different types of missions by clicking onto parts of a fully-drawn map of your campus. Enemies are represented with icon art and you get to see brief animations representing the different types of attacks you use while fighting them. In Zombiees!, you want to amass supplies and then exchange them for improvised weapons like the slingshot and glass shard. You can carry up to three different weapons with you at once and choose which one to use, though right now enemies don’t seem to have any traits that make it better for you to use, say, a melee weapon instead of just whatever deals the biggest damage numbers.
There’s a comedy aspect to Zombiees! that’s conveyed almost completely in the game’s text and art, which makes both player avatars and the zombies you battle look more cute than horrifying. Sometimes this is amusing, but other times some rough localization makes the jokes fall flat. Zombiees! was developed by a Vienna-based company, so it seems the game’s native language might be German. The localization certainly isn’t poor enough that the game isn’t playable, but there are going to be some jokes you stumble across that don’t really make any sense.
As in most text RPGs, you spend sessions of Zombiees! trying to grind through as many missions as you can before your energy runs out. Zombiees! isn’t as crazy about making you repeat missions as some other entries in the genre, probably because most missions boil down to multi-stage battles with different parts of a zombie horde. You do occasionally repeat missions to amass items required for story missions that progress the game’s plot, but this is still a relatively light amount of repetition. Overall, Zombiees! has a lot more to offer players with a short attention span than most other text RPGs, which can be grueling tests of patience.
While Zombiees! uses cute art, graphics, and comedy to liven up the staid old text RPG, playing it is still going to feel very familiar to any Facebook gamer who’s played one before. You are still basically running a treadmill, trying to make your numbers bigger so you can take out your in-game opponents and other players in the Fight Club. Zombiees! does let you do so in a way that doesn’t involve any gangsters, vampires, superheroes, fashionistas, or other usual suspects of the text RPG genre, though. That alone, and the fact that it’s basically a well-implemented game, may make it worth checking out.
