I Love Age of Zombies!

A week ago Twitter buddy and strategy guide lover @kerihonea dropped a tweet on us that piqued my interest:

Hadn’t heard of a new zombie game coming out, so did a little search and discovered that Age of Zombies is Halfbrick Studio’s new “mini” for the PSP and PS3 available for $4.99 from the PlayStation Network store, the PlayStaiton miniS series being their strategy for competing with iPhone game apps. While Keri generally likes most games, her critique above is resounding applause compared to her usual comments on other titles. So for five bucks what did I think I had to lose?

Best five bucks I’ve spent on a game. Thanks Keri!

Trash throngs of dead-heads in five time zones with a variety of weapons.

Age of Zombies is a top-down shooter like Berserk or–well, most of you are probably too young to remember Berserk, so let’s just say it’s a top down shooter where you move in eight directions with either the left stick or d-pad and fire in eight directions by pressing the face buttons or combos of two buttons (so if you want to fire towards the upper right, hold the square and triangle buttons at the same time, etcetera).

The hilarious story follows the exploits of mouthy hero Barry Steakfries as he goes to Professor Brain’s laboratory one night to kill the guy for no particular reason. There he finds the Professor has a “super awesome surprise” for him, having just perfected Hypertimealogical Transfer Machine. “Ah, an HTM. Interesting,” replies Badass Barry, as if he knows what the hell that means. If you’re also wondering, it’s a time machine which the Professor uses to send zombies to the farthest reaches of time to destroy mankind. After turning Professor Brains into a grease spot Barry jumps into the time portal and finds himself in caveman days. He must kill all the zombies and their super awesome zombie boss monsters in each time zone to save the day.

Age of Zombies features five stages with two or three levels each. The prehistoric times stage features a tutorial to acquaint you with the controls. After killing off several waves of caveman zombies without finding a caveman pet to take home and name Steve Bennett, you must defeat a Zombie T-Rex. Then Barry jumps to Prohibition era 1930′s to battle zombie gangsters, some of whom fire machine guns. The stage ends in a battle against a zombie car. Then Barry jumps to Ancient Egypt, Feudal Japan, and finally the future, with each stage ending in a boss fight.

Use the flamethrower to barbecue the outer edges of a horde.

In each level zombies flood out of time portals and you soon find yourself backing away from a massive horde. Tossing grenades into hordes helps, and so does circling around the edges of the area to corral the enemies together in a tight, centralized group. Pickups fall from the sky as you kill certain numbers of zombies (usually landing on the far side of the field from your position ). But pickups include cool weapons like flamethrowers, rifles, chainguns and SMGs, grenades, bazookas and trip-mines. In later stages zombies that glow red explode when shot, allowing you to destroy large crowds easier. A gauge on the right side of the screen shows how many more zombies you must kill to clear the level. If a boss appears, the gauge shows how much life the boss has remaining.

Between all battles we’re treated to the witty banter of Barry Steakfries, who doesn’t mind referencing Resident Evil games ad nauseam. That is, until the producers run out of ideas and start using placeholder text. (Don’t worry, this too is a joke that makes sense in the context of the whole.)

Despite the fun, Age of Zombies is over in a flash. No multiplayer either. Luckily there’s a Challenge Mode where you see how long you can survive and how high you can score in each stage. But still, for five bucks and a new game it’s a really addictive, old-school gaming experience that you’ll play repeatedly and won’t regret.

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Tags: Age of Zombies, minis, review