Defending towers from zombies in extreme low detail

Defending towers from zombies in extreme low detail

I got this title a few years ago in one of the many excellent Humble Bundles but apart from doing one or two levels for a Steam Christmas challenge, I have not played a lot of it.  But me and Eugene were stuck for something to play the other night due to his rig, Shepard, being out of action from an RMA’d Corsair H100 cooler.  And this was a very fast one to download, so we went for it.  And we were pleasantly surprised.

I didn’t care too much for this game the first time I played it, but I was just trying to play it in a hurry to get the Steam badge.  Having more time to get into it, I enjoyed it more.  It’s your basic normal tower defence game only with some twists on the theme.  You are fighting a campaign against zombies (referred to as Zeds) in the 60s and the game board consists of a number of territories.  Zeds spread across the territories, as they do and it’s your job to contain them.  You do this by picking a zone and going in there. Levels of infestation can range from 1 (a small town with not a huge number of Zeds) to 4 (A huge city completely covered in them).  You can win in one of two ways:

Kill all the Zeds before nightfall (this is when they swarm you).  This is the harder option, but nets you the territory which will give you campaign points each turn for as long as you can hold it.

Evacuate a set number of people from the city before they are eaten.  This is the easier option, but the Zeds will still hold the territory giving them campaign points each turn.

We started off trying to play it the latter way, but were getting thoroughly trounced over and over again so when the Zeds had got all the campaign points they needed to get the overall win, we restarted on a slightly lower difficulty and went with the Zed killing and territory holding route and this worked out much better for us.

The actual tower defence part is the main meat of the game and you are assigned different units for each turn, up to 5 in total.  These units can range from very useful, like a mercenary who you can point to wherever you want and will kill anything he sees.  To quite useless like barricades that can be used to filter Zeds to one place and that’s about it.  The units can be upgraded as you get experience and time and success will unlock newer and better units that can bring in or rain down much death on the Zeds.  It’s all very tactical and trying to make the best of the units you have can make the difference between winning and losing.

It’s all a lot to take in at first and it seems quite easy to lose a campaign or two before you figure out what you are doing and have even a chance of winning.  But once you do, it gets to be a lot of fun.  The co-op mode allows two people to control different units at the same time.  So one can direct soldiers and the other can direct artillery for example.  Meaning less multi-tasking and getting caught out.  It’s an interesting way to do co-op tower defence that I can’t recall too many examples of and playing with a friend always makes it more fun.

The writing is quite funny as well and the descriptions of the various mercenary units and archive of the campaign are very good reading if you can stay away from killing Zeds long enough.  The one minor down point, if it really is one, is that the graphics are extremely basic.  And I do mean extremely.  You view the city top down and all the Zeds and people and most units are simply different colours little square dots.  Even the city itself is very low detail not being much more than a series of grey squares.  But one could argue that this is to allow you to focus on the tactical side and not get distracted.  I didn’t mind it much really.

A fun but short Zed killing romp that has a lot of replay value packed in there should you want to return to it and explore further.  Sadly, I did not get any screenshots of this one myself, so I will just post a few from the internets here: