Review | Zombie Shooter 2

Format: PC | Genre: Action | Publisher: Sigma Team | Developer: Sigma Team | Release date: 23/09/09 | RRP:£12.85

By Martin Gaston

The mouse has become the most potent instrument of destruction in the last twenty years.

Collate the headshots clicked out in a decade of Counter-Strike alongside the number of Diablo’s minions felled by frenzied depressions, and you’ll end up with a number to put dual-stick controllers to shame. Sigma Team’s Zombie Shooter 2 is determined to exist as the most extravagant example of the venerable work-and-play input device’s clicky-clicky gore-dealing abilities. So hyperbolic is the game’s penchant for guts, limbs and blood spatters that the terrain of most levels is quickly obfuscated by the entrails of popped zombies. Well, some zombies, as the title is both entirely apt and a misnomer: the game is hardly discriminatory in what constitutes its eponymous monsters, instead opting to present all sorts of grimy nasties to disembowel, including dogs, giant fat women and hulking, steely beasts toting enormous rocket launchers, with spikes protruding from their back end.

There’s very little substance. You rain fire on anything that gets in your way. The intimate one-man quest for zombie genocide takes place in a variety of suitable places – the shopping mall, the forest, the secret underground lab – with all areas functioning as an interchangeable mix of corridors and wide-open spaces. Adjusting to fighting indoors and out is about as much variety as you’re going to get, though as your little marine tots around notching up the kill-count you amass an ever-increasing set of experience points, which can be squandered away on new skills to make your crude cookie-cutter squaddie pack even more wallop.

It’s reminiscent of the click-kill-click gameplay loop that made Diablo such an enduring success, with the lo-fi 2D isometric graphics certainly fuelling the rosy nostalgic feeling, but Zombie Shooter 2 pares back on the presentation values of Blizzard’s classic and compensates by ramping up the kill-count. The game evokes the familiar sensation of a genre well-travelled, only you realise there’s very little else like it in the current market. And while Sigma Team have been pushing the carnal attractions of their cheap and cheerful Shooter series since 2003, the established formula creates inexpensive games that sit quite happily on the hard drive to offer occasional bouts of gore-spewing mayhem.

//Undead blaster
A couple of hours in and the on-screen numbers escalate past the point of reasonable comprehension. The odds seem insurmountable, but Zombie Shooter 2 also packs the player with weapons that tear through 20 zombies in a single shot. The character might veer on the side of violent deity, but even that’s often not enough to stop the balance from feeling off. It’s hard to compete with a pack of mutants spewing homing pink gunk in your face and another group flinging rockets with reckless abandon, and the only trick to survive is walking backwards for minutes at a time and never letting go of the left mouse button. The other prominent offensive trick is circle-strafing around a pack of enemies and picking off the stragglers first – run into the middle of any conflict and you’ll be another indistinguishable crimson floor decoration within seconds. For a game that presents the image of wading knee-deep in the dead, the reliance on evasion feels unwelcome.

Sigma Team haven’t advanced the mechanics of Zombie Shooter 2 far past its first endeavour. There’s better graphics, with support for 1280×800, some more guns, new monsters and the occasional vehicle sequence where the camera pans out and gives the player access to weaponry of such high calibre the entire surrounding environment is inevitably minced, although even this is just a hastier version of the game’s on-foot moments. And that’s basically it. It’s hardly a new ride: the developers re-use the majority of their assets from previous games.

Zombie Shooter 2’s best moments come from quick bouts of action, so the lack of any sort of mid-mission checkpoint system mean it often fails to play up to its strengths. Missions outstay their welcome by stretching to the 25-30 minute mark. A session typically starts well, eliciting a quick gawp as you recall its levels of destruction, but the biggest problem is the inevitable lack of satisfaction when you exit back to the desktop.

Still, there are all sorts of grizzly moments to be had, and it’s an enticingly rare prospect to play a game that seems determined to feel as if it’s from the same time period as the action and horror flicks it so shamelessly riffs on. Zombie Shooter 2 is another occasionally fun diversion in a niche genre that Sigma Team seem determined to win over by quantity, but they’ve been making these games long enough to do better.

6/10

What does this score mean?

Zombie Shooter 2 can be purchased directly from the Sigma Team website. It’s also worth noting that Sigma Team pack an annoying, intrusive opt-out toolbar for your web browser into their installer. Boo.