Zombie Driver review

So you’d think Zombie Driver’s concept for the PC would be a fail-safe recipe for fun — drive around, smash into things, run over and shoot zombies.  And it was… for a little while.

After a brief montage showing our post-apocalyptic future, you are given a mission (the first is to save three people and kill 100 zombies) and put into a 2D city world setting, driving around in your car, ala the early Grand Theft Auto games.  Your car handles fine using keyboard controls, and is basically indestructible, as far as I could tell.  Aside from running over zombies, you can run into walls of houses, hit cars and make them explode, and your car comes out fine.  You do have to navigate a bit, but you never have to worry about being damaged by anything other than zombies.  The music appropriately drives the action (no pun intended), and the sound effects are perfectly zombie-esque.

Unfortunately, after a short time, the action gets very repetitive.  Sure, you can eventually shoot zombies, and get weapons, but the 2D zombies are barely identifiable as anything except little living things that turn into blotches of blood.   The retro style of the graphics doesn’t quite work for this type of game, with so many 3D zombie shooters and driving games out there, and it’s too limited a world to really be a sandbox game.   So the post-zombie killing adrenaline energy you are hoping to get is pretty minimal.  And since the gameplay is low on depth, you’ll soon tire of driving around the empty world of the game.

I guess if you’re looking for a time-killer, a game to play for a night, this wouldn’t be a bad choice.  But there are plenty of zombie shooters out there, or drive-around-and-be-brutal type games, that you could easily make a better choice.