In a social gaming landscape saturated with farms, cities, and mobsters, TipCat Interactive’s new release Zombie Party appears at first to be a novel experience, putting you in a wasteland infested with myriad zombies with only improvised weapons as a defense. In actuality, the gameplay of Zombie Party doesn’t much resemble either a party or zombie survival; it’s actually closer to the traditional resource collection and item building of other Facebook social games, with zombies presenting no real threat.
Zombie Party starts in a house with you, a weapons engineer, and several pieces of equipment that manufacture and store zombicidal weapons. The initial quests show you how to begin fighting the undead menace by researching new technologies, creating weapons, and erecting barricades and zombie lures.
You consume items like wood, rubber bands, stones, and rope to research cutting-edge weapons such as banana catapults, slingshots and crossbows. These “ingredients” can be found as random drops from zombies and rewards for completing quests. You can also purchase random ingredients at high cost from the in-game shop, or gift and trade with other players.
When ready, you can construct any of your researched items at “Production Machines”. These machines can produce items in varying amounts, but the more you want at a time, the longer it takes and the more it costs per weapon. As you level, you can also construct more machines to increase your weapon production capabilities.
To begin eradicating the undead, you can assign light weapons to your employees, mount heavy weapons around the house, or place traps for hapless zombies to wander over. You gain experience points and zombie coins for every zombie you destroy, along with random drops of extra coins and weapon ingredients.
These zombies, unlike their counterparts in movies, seem to have interest in nothing except lawn ornaments called “Attractions”. Initially, you’re only capable of erecting “Pumpkinheads”, which attract normal zombies but as you level you’ll be able to construct more ornate attractions like the roulette table that attracts the stronger businessman zombies.
When a zombie sees an attractor relevant to its interests, it’ll shamble towards the attraction and beat upon it until either the zombie or the attractor is destroyed. If an attraction takes too much damage, it’ll break down and stop attracting zombies until the player fixes it for a small percentage of its original cost.
Aside from attractions and production machines, you can also add plants and other foliage to your yard. Besides the obvious utility of beautifying your lawn, plants obstruct the movement of zombies, allowing you to herd zombies and otherwise impede their movement, which gives your avatars more time to shoot them down. You can also customize the floor and walls of your house, as well as your own clothing and coloring, though these changes are purely cosmetic.
As in every Facebook sim, you’re encouraged to visit your friends and assist them in miscellaneous tasks. You can also trade ingredients, as well as request or send gifts. As you level, you can recruit more of your friends to help destroy zombies at your house, though currently there are no player attributes, leaving no reason to pick one friend over another. Accumulating more friends does unlock special items, though.
Zombie Party is a recent release, and so lacks polish and a smooth gaming experience. In addition to lag issues, clicking on specific items becomes difficult as the screen fills with more zombies and goodies. The game also seems to total up your zombie coins incorrectly, sometimes resulting in the total shown being significantly different from what you actually have. The localization is noticeably rough in a few dialogue boxes, and in general the game expresses some inconsistent behavior in how zombies appear, items appear, and in how quests resolve.
The actual gameplay may leave some dissatisfied as well; though it looks like a zombie game, Zombie Party plays more like a restaurant sim like Cafe World than Plants vs Zombies, with most of your time going to tending to production machines that fabricate weapons and harvesting the zombies that wander into your range of fire.
But Zombie Party may satisfy other players by sticking to the style of other popular games. Zombie Party’s art and gameplay have room to improve, but with its trendy theme and resemblance to popular titles, it could do well.
Source: Inside Social Games
Tuesday, December 14, 2010