Zombies Ate My Neighbors

A review by Ovens

I once played this game with a friend when I was a kid, and I remembered it as being pretty fun. I now realize how stupid and easily amused I was back then. The first thing I'd like to say about the game is this: This game is really repetetive. One could go so far to say it is insanely repetetive. The only difference between levels seems to be sort of a change in layout and SOMETIMES a different type of environment. The different levels are cool at the beginning, but they seem to repeat WAY too often. There are basically seven types of levels: suburbs, mall, factory, haunted house, castle, and desert. There might be another type, but I forget what it is. The levels are usually pretty short, so after your eighteenth foray through what seems like the same area as the one from two levels ago, it gets kind of annoying. Now, on to the summary of my journey through this game.

Title screen

Character select screen

After you choose "START" at the title screen, you come to what sort of seems like a "character select/1 player or 2 players?" screen. You can choose to be a boy with spiky blond hair and those glasses that people wore to 3D movies in the 50's, or you can be a girl with a red hat and a purple coat. I decided that I liked those nifty glasses and chose the boy. Now, for those of you who haven't played it, it's a top-down shooter, meaning that it's played from a top-down perspective, and your primary action is shooting. Now, most top-down shooters for SNES and NES sucked ass, because they didn't have a button that allowed you to stand still. In the good ones, you could hold the R button or L button and you'd be able to just point your gun in any direction while staying in the same place. Then there's Smash T.V. These guys knew what they were doing. The d-pad controlled your movement, and the face buttons allowed you to shoot in any direction. So you could be moving left and shooting down at the same time. But, in most games, you have to move if you want to change the direction your're shooting, which is really annoying in heated battles when you have little room to move around. And this game is all about flooding you with enemies. I think it should be mandatory for all top-down shooters to have an option to stand still and change the direction you're shooting. I really liked the controls in this game, they were responsive and the button layout made it easy to switch weapons and items on the fly, so the only problem I had in this area was the lack of a "stand still and aim" button.

The point of this game is to go "rescue" all the people around the level. "Rescuing" is done by running into someone. You get different amounts of points for rescuing different people. A bitchy old teacher lady is worth like 10, tourists are worth 100 each, a guy grilling a hamburger is worth 5, and the burger is worth 100, babies are worth 700, and cheerleaders are worth 1,000. And none of these people have the sense to run away from the zombies and killer dolls and whatnot, they just stand there.

It's strange that people are still having cookouts when there is a zombie horde among them.

Everyone else died. Fortunately, I got 1000 points for the cheerleader alone, so I can't complain.

If an enemy runs into one of them, they die, and a little white soul will rise from their bodies. But, to complete a level, you must have saved at least ONE person and all other people must be saved or killed. Once these parameters have been met, a door with the word "EXIT" above it will appear near you, and you walk into it to clear the level.

The first level looked like a suburban neighborhood. The first thing I did was walk to the left and watch an old teacher lady get killed by a zombie. Great. Then I tested out my primary weaponry: a squirtgun. I don't think it had holy water in it, because I kept finding more ammo for it, and who the hell leaves a squirt gun full of holy water in their cupboards?

That zombie exploded because I squirted him.

So I was making zombies explode by shooting them with water, trying to rescue people from the zombies and, more importantly, their own stupidity. I found that if you pressed either shoulder button, a little radar screen popped up with little yellow blips indicating where the dumbass people were standing around waiting to be killed/rescued. There was some pretty interesting weaponry up for grabs as well.

This door looks like it leads to blackness, but it actually leads to a mall.

By the third level, I was in a shopping mall, throwing sixpacks of what seemed like club soda like grenades at little hell dolls with huge fucking throwing axes. Sometimes, when I hit them with the soda, they wouldn't die, they would just be set aflame and their heads would disappear, so I'd have to throw more soda to douse and kill the little flaming killer doll thing. Other weapons include: A bazooka, plates, silverware, either red water baloons or some kind of fruit, I can't really tell, popsicles, a weed whacker, and footballs.

The hell doll on the left will sometimes turn into the flaming hell doll on the right.

There are also some pretty cool items you can get. You can get an inflatable decoy clown, and whenever you use it, a clown will pop up and start laughing and most enemies will try to attack that instead of you. This is especially useful when you have to take on a bunch of chainsaw maniacs who are insanely hard to kill with the weak weaponry you have at your disposal at the time. There's also what seems like a little golden treasure box that lets out these balls of light that kill everything on the screen. You can also get healthpacks, and a different types of potions. There's a pink one which turns you into a huge purple monster which can't be hurt and can punch through walls and enemies. There's a blue potion which makes you invulnerable, but you can't attack or use items. Then there's a potion with a big ? over it which has a chance to heal you, and a chance to act like either of the other potions. I think it also has a chance to make you green and slow you down, I don't remember. This game has quite an impressive arsenal of weaponry and items, and for this it gets three cool points.

D:

I think level 22 was the one that had these huge sand worms which I couldn't beat, so I quit there. From what I've seen, this is a fairly decent game. It has a few problems, such as it fails to explain why water is fatal to zombies and psychotic hell dolls, and chainsaw-wielding maniacs, and it doesn't have a feature which allows you to stand in one place and shoot.

IN CONCLUSION: 7/10