So I decided to pick up another indie game that sounded interesting, and it’s called Zombies Ruined My Day. I would imagine that unless you’re a witch doctor that zombies would ruin everybody’s day. Like a little league baseball team coming to a chain restaurant after the big game and giving zero notice to the staff to prepare, they’re an endless wave of destruction, intent on devouring everything in sight. And also probably tipping poorly after they’re done.

You play as this unnamed character who’s really, really excited about a date with his love interest Carrie. She’s his Miss Pac-Man. The little red-haired girl to his Charlie Brown. The itty-gritty-kitty-litter to his Stimpson J Cat. And he should be excited, as he looks and dresses like someone who likes to visit other countries to pay for his dates. So creepy bowl-cut sideburns guy needs to survive wave after wave of zombies to get to his date with Carrie. That’s basically it. Straightforward, I know, but not everything needs some gimmick or twist.

The graphics are pretty low-budget but they’re not actually bad quality. The designs of the zombies are pretty funny and personally I like their little crazy teeth that stick out, also their big eyes. The blood spurts look great when you shoot them and there’s also some visible damage that shows with every hit they take. Explosions show bones and skulls flying out and they’re oddly shaped, just like the enemies. There’s 3 levels total, each being a different location and layout, with 8 stages or sub-levels each.

So not a ton of variety, but everything in this game is set the way it is for a reason. Like there’s no random zombies like you’d expect from a game like Dead Rising or Resident Evil. The basic civilian zombie who doesn’t do anything but walk around all look the same, and the SWAT or soldier zombies each look the same, and so on. And that’s because as the game progresses, there’s so much going on that you’re going to have to keep track of while playing that you’ll be glad you’ll know exactly what each enemy is just by looking at it for a second. The music is suitably creepy and actually pairs up with the goofiness of the zombies really well. It only plays between levels though, so you won’t actually hear anything other than explosions or gunshots or zombie grunting while actually playing.

I’m going to say that it’s an action game, but it has some tower defense elements to it. Basically there’s a set amount of enemies in each level, and your job is to properly fortify and kill them all to finish and get to the next. You’re given a pistol and one other predetermined weapon to start the stage, then it’s up to you on how you want to do the rest of it. You can pick up and drop barricades where you like, though throwing anything in this game is clunky because you have to use the shoulder buttons to control the trajectory, and the analog stick to aim. You cannot throw anything and fire at the same time, you have to select the item, then use it. This is a big problem I had because it’ll cost you precious seconds you need to toss something before going back to shooting, and a few seconds can very often be all that stands between you and a game over screen.

This was another game where I finished the last boss fight and got the ending screen and thought “that was it?” I think this format of game should be easy to just crank out levels so I was actually hoping for more when it was done.

That’s probably the biggest problem I had with this is the controls. You’ll pick up shotguns, grenades, proximity mines, mini guns, and so on, but to switch between these to pick something suitable for what you want to do forces you to cycle through whatever the weapon order is, and to land on the item or weapon you want, you’ll have to watch the item list instead of the action. I think that got me killed more often than anything else. Later into the game there’s a few levels with survivors that you have to protect – like this lady here who looks like she’s wearing diapers – who ironically can actually take some damage whereas the hero can’t, so that’s another thing you’ll be watching out for while switching items. So me personally, there should’ve been a better way to manage inventory.

On top of that the game just felt short. I beat it in a few hours, with some levels really trying my patience and required me to restart upwards of a dozen or more times. I might have screamed at the tv a couple times and wanted to break my controller. This was another game where I finished the last boss fight and got the ending screen and thought “that was it?” I think this format of game should be easy to just crank out levels so I was actually hoping for more when it was done.

So at the end of day it’s actually a pretty fun little game that unfortunately shouldn’t take that long to play through if you’re bored and want something cheap. You’ll have to strategize a lot in the later levels and plan out what you want to do, and you’ll die a lot until you get it right, though the game allows just enough improvising that it’s rewarding when you finally kill that last zombie and can breathe. In the middle of the action, it’s really rewarding to kill scores of zombies with grenades or using a much needed minigun that just dropped off a Rambo zombie to chew through a few dozen at once. Each zombie also does something different, so the combinations of them the game throws at you provides a challenge.