Coincidentally, zombies are all about the brains, and Zombies Overloaded is a no-brainer. A top-down shooter in the style of that classic title you probably never played, Smash TV, you play a Duke Nukem type that has to survive a series of zombie waves to score enough points to top the leaderboard.
There’s no story to speak of, just two core game modes: Overloaded Mode and survival in the Pacifist Mode. There’s not much to say about the latter other than you having to dash around a stage for as long as possible without being able to shoot a single bullet. Using a combination of dash and collecting power-ups to keep you alive and move from one screen to the other, it doesn’t have much to offer in the way of replayability.
Not that Zombies Overloaded’s core gameplay of blasting the undead is that much more inspiring, but it sure as hell is addictive. There are three arenas to pick from, pending you pay for two of them from the in-game currency, and they’re all the same in terms of structure: kill ever-increasing swarms of zombies, defeat a boss, then rinse and repeat.
Zombies Overloaded Review (Switch 2)
Zombies Overloaded is a twin-stick shooter where you’re armed with a default pistol with infinite ammo. It does a bit of damage, but you’re better off picking up one of the frequent drops that include a shotgun, machine gun, flamethrower or nuke that wipes out the current wave. The best weapon by far, however, is the ‘space gun’ a laser/rail rifle that shreds lines of zombies and is massively satisfying.
Killing everything will release the next wave, slightly faster and higher volume of enemies. With any rogue-lite, the key is to grind a stage to unlock coins that can be exchanged on permanent stat increases such as damage, speed, health, and a bone magnet. Coins are quite scarce and considering each stat is 50 coins and levels and cosmetics can be 250+, you can exchange an additional currency, bones, for more coins. Within a couple of hours, I’d managed to max all the stats.
Interestingly, the damage stat that I maxed out first didn’t have much of an effect. This was splitting. On the one hand, it meant that the Vinterm Games’ shooter can’t be cheesed and you still require skill to get through it. The other side of the coin however is having to repeatedly shoot the very first bosses with minimal effect, then essentially get one-shot by them. Annoying, but the nature of the genre.
Dying To Kill You
With enough coins, you can unlock one of the few extra arenas in Zombies Overloaded that seems like it’s a different mode, but it’s essentially the same setup of running around a restricted location for as long as feasibly possible, with the view of climbing the ranks and being badass, and all those other cliches.
Testament to the game’s replayability is the fact that I got an achievement pop-up declaring that I’d just killed my 10,000th zombie. And no, this isn’t a game I’ve been playing for 60 hours+ as you can effectively max out your stats in a fair amount of runs, and even faster if you have good luck, and by luck, I mean gambling your winnings in the hope you’ll get more cash to spunk on upgrades, levels and cosmetics.
The cosmetics are a nice touch as the main menu shows your new avatar, but from a top-down perspective, you don’t really see the benefits of your new skin. That said, the chicken costume causes your character to repeatedly cluck, and if that ain’t a game changer, I think you’re simply high-maintenance and hard to please.
Zombies Overloaded Review Summary
Zombies Overloaded is a simple game, and as we all know, those are sometimes all we need. Whether I’ll be playing this in the coming weeks, I’m not so sure due to having seen more or less everything in the first hour. Nevertheless, the fundamental gameplay is good, and as we all know, sometimes the pick-up-and-play arcade titles outshine the 90+ hour MMO hairfests.
