Zombie Party – Preview

Zombie Party is an action RPG shoot-em-up game that features a lot of different weapons, upgrades and of course time travel through different dimensions. Battle alone or with friends against hordes of enemies or just give up and run away, the choice is yours.

Zombie Party wastes no time to tell you a story but immediately throws you in its twin stick shoot-em-up world. Your goal is simply to get as far in the game as possible and get the highest score on the scoreboard. Currently, there are two gamemodes available: Adventure and Survival. Adventure simply lets you play through all of the worlds, once you complete all of them you enter hardmode which starts you off at the first one again. In order to progress worlds, you’ll have to fight through waves. After every five waves you’ll get a boss which will give you access to the next level after killing it. In Survival, you pick one world and try to survive as long as possible.

Immediately when playing, one main concern comes to light, the graphics. Zombie Party tries to look pretty retro with pixel art and 8-bit graphics but at times it seems too much and it’s hard to distinguish some features from another. Another bad point is that the game is locked at 30 FPS. The speed at which you play the game is tied to the FPS, luckily the game runs really good but if you’d have a horrible system you would be playing in slow-mo all the time. Also, if you pick up a slow-mo item, the game slows down to 20-25 FPS to simulate the effect, which is very noticeable and not that pleasant. Additionally, the game doesn’t have resolution support (yet) and somehow it has black borders at the sides when running at 1080p.

Moving to music and sound, there is a bit of mixed feelings involved. The tracks are alright but not the best and somehow the music stops playing in adventure mode once you hit world four or five (which were added recently so it’s probably not in full effect). Otherwise, the sound effects are simply bad. There’s a lot of diversity but they’re really loud and don’t really sound that good either. An individual volume slider for music and sound effects would go a long way, but currently this is not implemented. However, on the Steam discussion page the developer has said the effects will be changed in the long run, so hopefully they’ll be a lot better then.

Back to the gameplay! As said before, the game lets you choose which gamemode you want to play and after that you’ll have to choose a character. The characters are pretty similar to each other and only differ a little bit in stats and starting weapon. The first will give you a damage and health boost with a handgun while another one gives you luck and a speed boost with an SMG to his disposal and so on. It doesn’t really matter which character you choose because you can upgrade stats relatively quickly when playing.

As expected, the game uses a leveling system which allows you to upgrade the stats. Currently you can upgrade damage, health, speed, fire rate and luck. There’s also a slot for magic but it doesn’t work yet, so maybe we’ll see some fun stuff happening with magic down the road. You of course level up by killing enemies and bosses. Another thing that killing does is give you a score multiplier which can rack up pretty quickly when you’re killing a huge amount of enemies, but in order to maintain it you’ll have to be quick because it disappears as fast as you get it.

In order to help you get a high score, you have a big amount of weapons at your disposal. There are five main weapons: the handgun, smg, shotgun, assault rifle and grenade launcher. Then you have the super guns which can do everything from firing flaming teddy bears to firing a rocket salvo of rainbow grenades, everything is possible! The main weapons can all be upgraded with modifiers and artifacts. Each weapon has three modifier slots for modifiers like increased damage, shot speed, shot spread, etc. Then you have the artifact for the main weapons (except the handgun) which change the type of attack, for example rainbow homing shots or electricity.

You can get guns and ammo by picking them up or you can also spend your gold the enemies drop in the store, which is currently the only use for it. Maybe later there will be more fun and ridiculous stuff you can buy, but right now it’s between guns or ammo.

Additionally you can play together in local co-op with up to four friends to share the fun. Later on, online multiplayer should be supported but it isn’t the case right now. Also, if you’re a fan of big numbers, try to beat your own score time and time again on the scoreboard, however there’s no online scoreboard implemented (yet?).

Conclusion

Currently, Zombie Party is in ok condition. It’s fun to play, has a big variety of weapons and has weekly updates. To stay relevant however it should add a lot more diverse content. For an early access game it’s acceptable and fun to play, but without something that really stands out the game will get irrelevant quickly. Hopefully the game will get much more interesting with all the features that are promised on the Steam page.

Subsonic

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