Gamertell

Title: Burn Zombie Burn!
Price: $9.99
System(s): PS3 (via Playstation Network)
Release Date: March 30, 2009
Publisher (Developer): DoubleSix
ESRB Rating: “Mature” for blood and Gore and violence.
Pros: Constant action, fairly decent graphics, addictive and easy to play. Reminds you of a good ol’ arcade game.
Cons: Repetitive and sometimes too difficult.
Overall Score: Two thumbs up; 90/100; A-; * * * * out of five.

Burn Zombie Burn! is a shooter in the most basic sense of the genre with a nearly endless barrage of zombies coming for your brains and you have to blast, burn, mow, bash or otherwise thwart their attempts at feeding. It’s simple, it’s silly and holy roasted zombie guts is it fun.

Get Yer Boomstick Ready

You play as a bobble-headed animated version of Bruce Campbell (Elvis lipped, big chinned and donning a Hawaiian shirt) in typical horror film settings with a constant influx of undeadites heading your way. You begin with a simple handgun and pick up myriad weapons including bats (baseball and cricket), a flamethrower, rapid-fire guns and even a lawn mower. Some are temporary - the best of the bunch - and respawn while others last a while. Kill enough zombies with the same weapon and you activate a giant red button that causes an area-wide effect (rain, dancing, whathaveyou).

You basically run around the map, killing everything that moves, until the level ends. Keep to the edges and you often have a good vantage point, especially from the biggest of the incoming opponents, but that also means you can easily get trapped.

You play a half dozen levels on a half dozen maps either trying to survive a long as you can or preventing the zombies from getting your girlfriend parked in the middle of the level.

Burn, Baby, Burn

This game screams old school arcade, feeling a lot like Robotron in most of the right ways. The only thing that was missing was the dual stick firing option where, in Robotron, the Left stick controlled movement and the Right firing, allowing for a nice, constant rapid-fire attack. instead, you have to either settle for the game’s slow-fire pace or mash the button. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but would certainly cause less thumb stress for longer bouts of zombie bashing.

The weapons are all pretty funny, with the bats being the weakest, flinging zombies out of your path while the lawn mower literally clears a path of carnage. You have a flamethrower at all times so that you can ignite zombies which may make them faster and more dangerous, but the flames scare (some) ther zombies and, when they die, they drop higher level powerups.

There are some temporary gaps between waves of zombies (and the game does track waves) coming up from the ground but, as the game progresses, the gaps become less noticeable so the attacks do become constant.

The game’s main fault may seem to be the repetition but the types of zombies increase in speed, size and resilience - and humor - as you progress through the game, so patterned attacks ultimately prove to be quite temporary. The issue then becomes those waves of uber zombies that come at you in the midst of an already unmanageable horde, bringing you down well before you are ready. Strangely, it’s enticing enough to keep coming back even though you know that every quest is ill-fated.

Pulling the Trigger Bombastic

The game may be pretty simple but it is ye old arcade-style shooting fun. It has just enough humor to make it funny the first few times and then not stay in your face a few hours in.

My complaints, as I mentioned above, are quite small compared to the amount of simple and addictive shooting action. Even though I wish the controls were exactly like the great-grandfather game Robotron, Burn Zombie Burn! easily satisfies that primitive need to watch stuff literally go up in flames.

Don’t miss the photo gallery and the game trailer below.

Site [Burn Zombie Burn!] Photo Gallery [Gamertell]

Check out the gallery: Burn Zombie Burn! screen shots and art