Slice Zombies for Kinect Review

No matter where you look, the humble zombie is most definitely the flavour of the month in the gaming community. From Garden Warfare to Call of Duty and Sniper Elite, the walking undead have turned up, created havoc and embedded themselves into the lives of gamers. The one safe bastion on Xbox One was the motion tracking, voice controlled Kinect system, but with Slice Zombies for Kinect, even that has succumb to the onslaught.

Let’s get one thing straight. Slice Zombies is in every sense of the word, an utter Fruit Ninja clone. However, from when we were once completely addicted to slicing and dicing fruit, the recent release of Fruit Ninja Kinect 2 arrived to nothing more than luke-warm applause and points to the fact that many gamers may just have had enough of the swiping of fruit. But hey, if we throw some zombies in instead then everything should be good eh?

As much as the developers, MADE GmbH obviously think so, I beg to differ.

It’s true that I’m a big fan of Kinect. The Xbox One version especially is a big part of my life and I could no longer get by without it. In fact, one of my most favourite games of last year – Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved – showed exactly what could be done with the motion tracker when placed in the right hands. It was completely responsive and worked amazingly well. In my eyes, all Kinect titles are now putting themselves up against Fantasia, and if they don’t match up, then I’m afraid I have little time for them. It was this issue that I had when recently reviewing Fruit NInja 2.

And unfortunately, Slice Zombies for Kinect fairs little better. In fact, it comes off worse.

If you bear in mind that the game is made by such a small indie studio, Slice Zombies nearly holds its own up against its fruitier rival. But it’s not up to us to worry about the size of the project, the size of the cash stream or whether the guys behind the game have any previous experience. All we want is a game that plays well, is fun to interact with and can give us many hours of enjoyment. Slice Zombies just about holds on with the former, but the latter two requests are very much a struggle.

For anyone who hasn’t yet guessed, the aim of the game is to slice as many zombies as you can. Waving your arms around aimlessly will, to a certain extent work, but in order to miss the game ending bombs and to grab the highest score possible and the most coins you can, you’ll need to work your hands like the very best of ninjas. Headshots and multiple zombie slashes bring decent combos to the table and it’s these which help your score rise. But miss three zombies in any one session and it’ll be game over.

If you’ve earnt enough points, you may be able to unlock some snazzy visual extras from the store and you’ll most definitely grab a large number of achievements but other than that – and gaining a place on the worldwide leaderboard – you’ll just be tasked with ploughing on with another game once again. There seems to be little in the way of a raising difficulty level and once you’ve gone through a 90 second or so game time and time again, then that ugly game killer known as boredom, very quickly sets in.

Even the astonishingly bright visuals, catchy backing track and playful zombie characterisation struggles to keep you interested and whilst the recent Fruit Ninja 2 at least had a few extra mini games and some multiplayer madness to take part in, Slice Zombies has nothing other than a standard grinding mode. Yes, you’ll possibly want to keep playing in order to unlock the decent amount of stash in the shop, but only with sessions lasting five minutes at a time. Anything more than that and you’ll quickly become distracted.

And much of that is down to the way the player has been cast. No matter how close you stand to your Kinect, the player shadow (and therefore the reach of your character) is far too small. Hitting any zombies or coins that dare to go near the edge of your screen is nigh on impossible and that means you are left concentrating on a small mid screen section in order to score the points. If by some miracle all the big point scoring zombies are flung onto the screen in that position then you’re laughing. But if they don’t… it’s pretty much game over. For the record, I’d normally find myself controlling a Kinect title from around 8 feet away from the TV, Slice Zombies has me standing completely central around 3 feet away and I still struggle to reach the outer limits of the screen.

The odd loss of player control (I’m pretty certain its not Kinect’s fault), also causes more aggro than is needed and there have been multiple times when I’ve struggled to even get the game to recognise I’m stood in front of it, instead being prompted to ‘sign in’ constantly.

It may be fast paced and superbly bright, it may also have a reasonable number of zombie variants to dice (with Evil Zevel bringing a brief sense of enjoyment), but if you really need a Kinect slicer, then you’ll find the fruit version and its multiplayer offering brings just that little more to your life than taking apart zombies.