Atom Zombie Smasher (single player) Review

Yatzhee (the person) claimed that one of Left 4 Dead's strengths as a zombie game is that Valve could have replaced their zombies with koalas, and it still would have felt like a zombie game.

In Brendon Chung's Atom Zombie Smasher all the zombies are purple dots, and it still feels like a zombie game.

Atom Zombie Smasher is two games in one, an excellent real-time strategy game and an okay turn-based strategy one. It's also a series of comics, slide shows, and articles, with goofy llama-based super weapons, goofy assassination attempts, goofy killer robot-fighting, goofiness.

Atom Zombie Smasher's background music is surf guitar.

In short, AZS is a Zombie Apocalypse Real-time Turn-based Comics Slide Show Articles Surf Guitar game, all for only ten dollars (and less if it's on sale).

First I want to sell the real-time strategy element, because it's so good. Each battle is fought over a bunch of city blocks. You have a God's eye view of a 2D, quadrilateral map, and you'll have at least one of two goals: save as many civilians as possible before they are all dead and undead, OR kill everything (that is zombie). The yellow and blue dots are the civilians. The purple dots are zombies. You'll deploy with a green dot squad of troops, a building-perched sniper team, a rescue copter called the Pleasant Pheasant, and a cannon. Or not. Sometimes the game will send you in with road blocks, mines, or maybe just a machine gun cannon called the Elephant Bird. Maybe instead of the road blocks you'll have your sniper squad or zombie bait. The unit combinations are different whenever you visit another city (unless you start a campaign with the non-random units modifier).

So every battle is a little different. And almost all are filled with drama, as any of the hundreds of zombies can undeadify a whole crowd of people within two seconds of touching them. You'll end up calling in artillery strikes right next to helpless crowds and hope the not-very-accurate shells won't end up falling on them. Or maybe, if it's a small number of zombies approaching, you can tell your sniper team to aim in that new direction, hoping that they can set up and aim fast enough to prevent zombie-civilian contact.

Not to say it's only a game about fast-thinking. Before a battle begins you're required to place soldiers and things here and there on buildings, grass, and streets. If your goal is to save lots of civilians, you'll want to turn the city blocks into a maze of death (against the zombies, not the people). If you fail a mission (if too many civilians died), you can restart said mission, and the game will ask if you want to set up with your troops and things in the same spots they began the mission in.

Oh, did I mention that (okay I didn't) you level up your troops and equipment? You do! Which means that the game is a little addictive, making you feel invested in your army and its mission to save Nuevo Aires.

Also buildings blow up, so the mazes change not just between cities but during battles.

Now on to that turn-based game. It's a lot like Risk in that the campaign map is a bunch of puzzle pieces stuck together, and that the higher the number in a puzzle piece (1-4), the stronger the Zed army.

The differences from Risk? The enemy is bunch of zombies. There's no politics. And a "4" zed level means all you can do in the province is Kill Everything.

The problem with Atom Zombie Smasher stems from the only ways to make it significantly more challenging. They are modifiers called "Hardcore Mode," which makes the zombies run, and "No Quarter," which makes the zombies able to invade any province, including ones you own (and sometimes they'll invade at level 4 strength). The "Hardcore Mode" makes winning short campaigns impossible, and "No Quarter" makes winning long campaigns impossible. (You can set the campaign score needed to win; the first person -- Player or Zed -- to reach number X wins). I didn't want to play another campaign that couldn't keep me wondering if I was going to win or lose; after playing one-and-a-half campaigns I got enough of a sense of what the Risk map would look like, in terms of zombie-control, to tell if I was going to win or lose in the following hours. Thus, I lost interest in AZS before even winning a campaign; 3.5 hours after starting the game I felt like playing it only so I could write this review.

Tom Chick (the amazing American games journalist) said of AZS and its too-high difficulty that they constitute a perfect representation of our post-Vietnam/Iraq cultural shifts. AZS gives you a limited number of military resources and asks you to save a Latin American country from insurgent Zombiism. Once you figure out how to beat the game on the no modifiers difficulty (which you'd probably do in a couple hours) the only ways to be challenged in AZS are to be over-challenged and....to be over-challenged. Thus Nuevos Aires is actually VietIraqinamistan.

And I agree. It's hard not to; the game even tells us (via spoken words) to be wary of the military-industrial complex. But, unlike super Chick, I see its representing our distrust of Capitalism as not enough of a virtue to bring this game the instant-classic status it almost deserves. At hour 3.5, I knew I was going to win my second campaign, an hour before I won it.

But in all, if you are not on a budget, consider Atom Zombie Smasher a must-play.

★★★★☆