A Rotten Resurrection
Like a retro-obsessed necromancer, Zombies Overloaded tries to resurrect the joys of old-school arcade chaos. Much to the dismay of everyone involved it instead flounders like an unfinished abomination and serves up a sluggish grind wrapped in uninspired and short-sighted design choices.
Trying To Channel The Classics
The premise of Zombies Overloaded is simple – you are locked in a room and zombies will hobble their way towards you in ever larger waves. You are armed with your trusty pistol, and various weapons will spawn in over time. Your goal is to survive as long as you can whilst racking up bones and coins. Bones act as a mid-run currency, useful for spawning weapons and power-ups, while coins – earned over time – unlock new stages, skins, and permanent stat boosts.
This is where the modern game designer’s urge to put in unnecessary progression into a game rears its ugly head. You have a handful of stats that impact your damage, speed, health, and the range in which you can suck up bones. Each individual upgrade is fairly uneventful, but once you max out one (or all) of your stats, the cumulative boosts become apparent.
The Curse Of Modern Progression
The issue with this system is that your character starts the game almost unplayably bad. Damage is non-existent, you die to a stiff breeze, controls are unresponsive, and if you ever think about picking up a bone you are likely going to die. It also takes a fair chunk of time to amend these issues. This grind-heavy progression forces players to slog through hours of miserable gameplay just to make the game tolerable.
That tedium infests the rest of the game as well. Since everything is tied to coins, you are incentivised to boost your stats which means you aren’t unlocking new stages. This in turn means you are grinding from the word go and repeating the same stage over, and over again. As far as first impressions go, Zombies Overloaded spits in your face.
Repetition Kills The Fun
Then you have to factor in the fact the gameplay itself is flatout boring. Nearly every weapon feels underwhelming – the shotgun, in particular, is an insult to the gun’s sacred video game lineage. Enemy variety is low. The stage gimmicks are undercooked at best. And Pacifist Mode? It just makes you run in circles for as long as you can stomach it. In short, it’s a complete snooze-fest from the word go.
Credit where it’s due: Zombies Overloaded improves once you’ve maxed your stats – though by then, it’s too little, too late. There’s nothing else to do bar score chase on the online leaderboards. Score chasing can be a great incentive to replay a game but Zombies Overloaded’s system is so basic that it just boils down to shoot and don’t die.
Drab Visuals And Bland Audio
Visually Zombies Overloaded is highly reminiscent of a bad flash game from the early 2000’s – which is to say it’s very basic. There’s very little in terms of visual flair here, which further stagnates the combat. The audio doesn’t fare much better with repetitive droning music inspiring nothing but boredom and sound effects having zero punch, impact, or razzmatazz.
The one possible redeeming feature of Zombies Overloaded would be the inclusion of a genre staple – multiplayer. Everything’s better when done with friends. Even suffering. Alas Zombies Overloaded does not have any multiplayer components so you are trapped in this dull, droll mess all on your lonesome.
Leave It In The Grave
Zombies Overloaded, rather fittingly, is a soulless, mindless grind – a lifeless, repetitive shooter that buries any semblance of fun under six feet of poor design. In missing the mark so staggeringly, Zombies Overloaded should be avoided at all costs lest you yourself end up shambling through your local cemetery.
Important Links
This Arcade Shooter is OVERLOADED with Zombies! Can You Survive the Mayhem? – https://www.thexboxhub.com/this-arcade-shooter-is-overloaded-with-zombies-can-you-survive-the-mayhem/
Buy Zombies Overloaded on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/zombies-overloaded/9P04PD24Q0HR/0010
