I’m pleased that the influx of zombie games has steadily died down over the past few years, as there’s only so much the living can take. By now, the undead are relatively welcome in this house, especially when The Zombie Slayers is a top-down shooter with tower defence elements. By tower defence, I simply mean turrets.
Primarily a multiplayer game, Billy-No-Mates and his imaginary friends can easily pick up this title, as you really don’t need a social circle to fend off the hordes of undead. There are simple strategies for survival: keep running and stocking up on ammo. Alternatively, and what worked for me, barricade yourself in and get used to using a spanner.
The Walking Dead and their character development can go in the bin, as The Zombie Slayers is a pick-up and play shooter. Your avatar is, of course, much more permanent than disposable characters, but there’s no narrative here we need to uncover; just acknowledge that the end is nigh, and unless you’re willing to think fast, you’ll be joining their ranks in no time.
There are two core modes to the game, and they’re both very different. Sure, they both involve zombies and survival, but the mechanics differ. In Survival Stories, you have to follow an objective, usually involving finding switches and defeating waves of zombies until the next area. Team up with your pals, or use the bots. Pro tip: they’re rubbish in this mode.
The second mode in The Zombie Slayers is Brutal Zombie Waves. As you can expect, you fend off enemy attacks wave after wave. I’m not the biggest fan of endless survival, but this mode offers immediate progress. As long as you can survive the first couple of waves, you can accumulate some pennies to invest in defences, supplies, and other goodies to keep going. Surprisingly, this mode is really easy if you invest in the right tools.
While both modes differ, the fundamentals apply. From the perspective of a mouse, an on-screen cursor indicates the direction of fire, and with a handful of weapons and throwables, you can take out enemies that way. In terms of defence, you can place all manner of items such as turrets, electric traps and barbed wire. Additionally, you can place supply boxes to refill ammo (incredibly scarce) and health. The real piece de resistance is having a baby co-op with you that will effectively shit itself and take out zombies, pending you top it up with milk.
What was quite surprising about The Zombie Slayers is how the structures work. With enough zombies triggering the traps, eventually they’ll disappear, but the turrets never take damage and just need to be reloaded. Pending you get a system working, when you are doing the Brutal Zombie Waves, you can trench in, hire a baby, and also four other AI bots (or random hoomans) to go out and clear up the scrags. Note that this is for the more stationary approach, as the objective-based missions are much more challenging, though a quick melee hammer to the head is an absolute godsend and often better than the guns in the game.
My initial beef with Rashad Ibrahimli and Indie.io’s game was not being able to play it effectively on the Steam Deck. The camera view can be rotated by 90 degrees using Z and X, but this doesn’t work well on the Deck and would have been better if it could have been incorporated into the right stick. Additionally, the keybindings are off, so I had to play this exclusively on my laptop. Yes, the end of the world, etc, etc. However, once getting into the game after this minor hurdle, there wasn’t enough to encourage repeat playthroughs.
While The Zombie Slayers has a decent customisation option where you don’t spend cash to get new cosmetics and instead earn XP to win new gear, there’s something about the game that feels like it’s from Roblox. Now, that’s a phenomenon in itself, and while many of us <ahem> real gamers think 99 Nights in the Forest looks arse, heaps of people are playing it. Give your mates a call through Steam, Discord or smoke signals, and this could be a game you could really get into.
Looks aren’t everything – ask my wife – but the clunkiness of the controls and not being able to play properly on the Steam Deck, the Roblox visuals and zombies that move at an alarming pace (28 Days Later speed) is quite the concoction. It might be an acquired taste or maybe I’m getting out of touch with the norm. Either way, it’s a good zombie game, though not for me.
