Escape From Zombie City

Are you sick of zombies yet? The sheer number of zombie games coming out (and being bought in droves) would suggest not.

Escape From Zombie City offers up a fairly unique and entertaining take on the undead genre, giving you only the bare essentials to survive an apocalypse.

It's a little rough around the edges, and becomes repetitive later on play, but there's a lot to appreciate here regardless.

Brain training

A zombie outbreak has taken place. You play as a soldier who's rushing to escape the city before a bombing raid happens at dawn.

The story is told via an endless sea of the undead. You make your way up the screen, picking paths through the zombie hordes, saving survivors, collecting ammo, and escaping through the exit door.

Thanks to the severe lack of ammo and massive numbers of zombies that will either amble slowly around in packs or scuttle towards you purpose, Escape From Zombie City is a strangely unsettling experience.

Your ammo and health carry over to each level, so you're always having to keep track of your reserves. The gameplay is tight, and blasting your way through hordes is very satisfying, yet pretty creepy at the same time.

Even though levels are linear, there's a very open-world feeling to the game. You're not told the best way to win - instead you're left to experiment with picking zombies off from behind the locked gate, trying out different weapons on the fly, or running like hell towards the exit.

Ugly

Chasing ranks, completing special missions, and speed-running your way through Endless mode are great side-orders for the main spectacle.

But Escape From Zombie City is a pretty ugly game, both in its characters and its dull backdrops, which ends diminishing the potential for immersion.

The game becomes quite samey after a while, too - after you've seen a dozen or so levels you've essentially seen all the game has to offer, and everything else is simply a more difficult repeat of what's gone before.

And switching weapons is an almighty pain, especially when you're surrounded by hordes on the brink of death. There are multiple control schemes, but none of them offers appropriate weapon select support.

Escape From Zombie City puts forward plenty of neat twists on a worn-out genre. With a little more spit and polish, a follow-up could be a 3DS essential.