Zombies, love ‘em or loathe ‘em, there’s no denying they’re everywhere these days. Personally, I’m becoming increasingly ambivalent. While I initially appreciated the undead renaissance of recent years, it is starting to feel more than a little done to death as a genre. And no place is this truer than in the world of video games, where we’ve been overrun with a plethora of lazy and uninspired zombie-related fodder.
Thankfully, Zombie Night Terror actually offers a somewhat fresher take on the subject. It does this by not only having you actually masterminding the zombie apocalypse but also by reanimating the long-dead corpse of Lemmings. Let’s face it, a spiritual successor to the classic Amiga puzzle-platformer has been long overdue.
And it does feel like a natural evolution of the concept. Instead of guiding a group of gormless but indefatigable rodents through a 2D landscape, you’re in charge of an army of endlessly shuffling zeds. The intention may be more nefarious, but the core principles remain the same. Like Lemmings, control of your living dead is largely indirect. Without intervention, they’ll cheerfully march in the same direction until they either perish or are forced to turn back around. Although, unlike our furry green-haired friends, these ravenous little blighters also devour any delicious brrrrrrraaaaaiiiiiinnnnsss stupid enough to get in their way, which conveniently helps to swell your ranks.
But Zombie Night Terror involves far more than just getting your boys home. The action follows a loose but entertainingly wacky narrative that revolves around a dodgy street drug known as Romero, the mad scientist who cooked it up, and those attempting to thwart your plans for world domination. As such, objectives tie into the plot. Sometimes it will be a simple case of infecting all the humans or reaching a designated exit. Other scenarios involve surviving multiple waves of heavily-armed assailants, assassinating well-protected characters, chase sequences, and even tricky boss fights.
There are 40 discrete levels divided into four chapters. The game breaks you in gently, with the first chapter effectively playing out like a tutorial that gradually introduces the mechanics. Essentially, there are two key ways of manipulating your festering minions. Firstly, you can set commands via clicking on environmental icons, thus deciding whether your zeds smash down susceptible doors, use or bypass stairwells, activate new spawn points, or destroy power generators.
Secondly, similar to the skills system from Lemmings, DNA can be spent on upgrading targeted individuals with mutations. There are eight in total – some permanent, others single use – each helpfully explained by in-game news bulletins. You rarely have access to more than a few DNA points on any given level, and even then you’ll often have to work to reach the barrels containing them.
Mutations comprise things such as the ability to run, jump, explode, or climb walls. You can even create a Left 4 Dead-style tank – a rampaging bullet sponge that can smash through walls and crush all but the toughest of foes. However, by far the most useful is the overlord. Not only do they fulfil the indispensable blocker role from Lemmings, but they can be smartly combined with most other mutations, making them highly versatile and cost efficient. They can throw their peers over obstacles, urge every biter that passes them to sprint, act as a rally point, or self-destruct in a spectacularly gory explosion. And when you’re finished with them, they can be “sacrificed” to recoup some of that valuable DNA.
At its heart, Zombie Night Terror is a puzzle/strategy game. As with Lemmings, success requires observation, experimentation, and some thought before then devising and executing a proper game plan. It’s about carefully manipulating the movements/actions of your walkers, gating and releasing them when necessary, using resources wisely, minimising losses, and recognising and responding to danger promptly. You need to find ways over pitfalls and traps, get to hard to reach places, solve button conundrums, and deal with increasingly difficult foes.
Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics, Zombie Night Terror is not an easy game, and it can be rewarding and frustrating in equal measures. The good news is that it recognises many of the flaws that plagued Lemmings. It’s a lot less fidgety thanks to being able to set actions and mutations while paused. Plus, you can zoom in and out, selected zombies are clearly highlighted, and there are far more hotkeys. It also feels less repetitive thanks to a wider variety of goals, hazards, and puzzles. And the bonus challenges give you a reason to revisit completed levels.
However, it’s not without its fair share of problems. The difficulty is all over the place and often goes against the sequence of play, with some of the hardest maps being in chapter 3. There’s also a heavy reliance on trial and error as opposed to logical deduction, which may put some people off. Later levels are incredibly demanding in terms of timing and precision, allowing little breathing space or room for even the tiniest of slip-ups. This is something that’s exacerbated by the unpredictable behaviour of the humans. Repeatedly hitting the restart button is very much a part of the experience, but it was in Lemmings as well.
Also, I didn’t really enjoy the last third of the game. It focuses too much on boss fights, wave survival maps, and attrition-style battles that felt more cruel and gruelling than fun and satisfying. In particular, the final boss fight was just awful. It’s one of those where he keeps coming back bigger and stronger after each apparent defeat with even more complications thrown your way. To me, this all seems a bit of out of place in a Lemmings-style puzzle game.
Visually, I think it looks fantastic. This is clearly a game built on low-res nostalgia; not just for the golden of age zombie flicks, but it also harks back to the 8/16-bit era when puzzle games were seriously mainstream. It’s defined by monochrome pixel art accentuated with excessive ruby-red blood splatter and the occasional splash of primary colour for dramatic effect or the purpose of highlighting important objects. The multi-layered parallax scrolling is gorgeous, with the backdrops brought to life with atmospheric lighting and weather effects, as well as incredible attention to detail.
It’s a grimy world of rundown apartments, seedy nightclubs, spooky graveyards, gloomy subways, infested hospitals, and sinister underground complexes. Basically every location you’d expect to see in a classic zombie film. And it manages to squeeze a lot of personality into such tiny sprites, with all manner of beautifully animated characters and joyously grisly death sequences. And I love the VHS sound effects and tracking lines when you pause and fast forward the carnage. Capping it off is a brilliantly dynamic synthwave score that sets the mood perfectly and which I’m seriously tempted to buy. Though ironically, it evokes John Carpenter far more than George R. Romero or Goblin.
Not taking itself too seriously, it’s also jammed packed with daft humour and darkly comic moments. The voice acting is delightfully silly gobbledygook (translated via speech bubbles), and it’s worth checking out the many amusing conversations and events going on in the background. Plus, you’ll find a tonne of gratifying pop culture and genre references on other franchises including The Terminator, The Walking Dead, Portal, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Left 4 Dead, and pretty much every zombie film from the 70s and 80s.
Overall, Zombie Night Terror is a fun, humorous, well-made, and great looking spiritual successor to Lemmings. However, it’s at its best and most rewarding when it sticks to being a puzzle game – the final third marred by too many boss fights and attrition battles. And many will find the inconsistent difficulty and the demanding precision to be frustrating. But I’d love to see some new maps, and I think it would really benefit from the addition of a level editor. I’m sure the community could produce some lively creations and interesting challenges.
Developer: NoClip
Publisher: Gambitious Digital Entertainment
Platforms: Windows, Mac
Release Date: 20th July 2016