All Zombies Must Die Review

What's weird about All Zombies Must Die is that my original pros ended up being my final cons. I started off liking the simplicity of the twin-stick shooter and the tongue-in-cheek jokes, but eight hours in, I was over it and ready for something different. All Zombies Must Die is fun, but it's the same 15 minutes of fun over and over again.

The town of Deadhill has been overrun by the undead, and our four playable characters have to make their way to safety -- or at least back and forth on fetch quests. See, All Zombies Must Die is a twin-stick shooter mixed in with RPG elements. Every zombie skull you empty and every quest you complete rewards you with experience points to make your character stronger and faster.

I love that. When I started playing, I just camped on one of the maps and blew away zombie after zombie with my shotgun to level grind and give myself a bit of an edge. Deadhill is broken up into different sections of town. These act as levels you're free to traverse as you see fit. But to cross between them, you'll have to do a quest for a robotic gatekeeper. Simple chores like killing 15 zombies start the game, but by the end, you need to smoke 30 electrified joggers or earn a specific item. In the beginning, the method is great for getting to know the gameplay, but by the end, I just wanted the gates to be out of my way. The last thing I wanted while on a quest for a character's comic book and surrounded by the undead was to suddenly be given a toll booth mission to collect four hamburgers.

For me, this is what sucks the wind from the All Zombies Must Die sails -- repetition. When I started, I thought that I'd be getting a DeathSpank-like experience where I'd be killing things over and over again but it wouldn't feel exactly the same each time. The way All Zombies Must Die is setup (talk to the gate, complete its objective, do it again after the loading screen) makes traversing the map feel the same from the first quest to the last.

Developer Doublesix peppers in a crafting system to make new weapons, loot drops and plenty of specialty zombies, but this didn't change the cut and dry format of every quest. In fact, some of the super mutants and straight jacket-wearin' zombies the game adds later only served to annoy me and point out how thin this formula is.

Four players can play All Zombies Must Die cooperatively, but there's no online option. As usual, this sucks. There's no voice acting, but the dialogue can be funny. One of the characters knows that he's in a video game, so there are some early references that break the fourth wall and are good for a laugh. Still, when those same ideas were being driven home towards the end of the game, it was a bit much.

Greg Miller is IGN PlayStation Executive Editor and an avid wing-eater. When he's not filming PlayStation Conversations or yelling on Podcast Beyond, he's walking his wiener dog, Portillo. He's so into zombies that he is a reoccurring character on the zombie audio drama We're Alive. Follow his shenanigans on Twitter and My IGN.

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