Review: Zombeer (PC)

Look hard and you'll see the
Plants vs. Zombies reference.

While 2011's LA Noire was made to accommodate and elevate many of my specific tastes in entertainment, Zombeer takes the things I like and beats them with a baseball bat and heaves the whimpering bundle into a dumpster.

While I revelled in the LA Noire's grittiness and attention to detail lavished on an open world adventure game dressed in an episodic police procedural from the 1950's, Zombeer takes everything base and stupid and throws it together without thought or planning. Zombeer opens with "K" waking up in a bar with a bad zombie bite and his girlfriend absent. From there the game wades through hacked together, uninteresting pop culture references.

The chicken pulley from Escape from Monkey Island? It's just laying on a stove in an early part of the game. Move into the next room, "Oh, look it's the cake from Portal! A flux capacitor stuck to the wall! A severed arm of a Big Daddy! A giant-breasted nod to Han Solo's time in carbonite!" For no reason at all you wander through a small section of Minecraft. 2001's monolith shows up, as does an alien face-hugger pod and references to LOST and Alan Wake. Then Edgar Allan Poe's headstone, with a crow perched on it? (It was a crow -- ravens are much larger.) It's all random and pointless.

The closest the game ever comes to humour is the developer commentary collectibles but that's like saying the moon is close to Earth. The "commentary" takes jabs at the game but they only served to remind me I was wasting time with Zombeer.

With so much pop culture sprayed throughout the environment, maybe the shooting makes up for it? No. There's no weight to any of it and the difference between the two guns -- a nail gun and a squid-like shotgun -- provide little "visceral feedback." That is, the rushing zombies offer little evidence that the guns are having any effect until the zombies keel over or "Headshot!" is announced. The grenade weapon is just as bad and the single melee option -- a pink dildo -- is akin to flailing around with a piece of tall dry grass.

Even moving around the environment feels floaty and detached!

Bizarrely enough, even though Zombeer is far less than a graphical juggernaut than most every other games out there, on the highest graphical settings the game is a stuttering mess that heightens the floatiness of the entire game package. Throttled back, it becomes playable, in as much as you can play it on a technical sense, but whether it's playable or should be played is another matter entirely.

Maybe it was an attempt to make things a little more interesting, K constantly needs to drink Zombeer, which litters the environment, to stave off zombification. There's a constant ticking down of a meter at the bottom of the screen that leads to the inevitable one-liner as K downs another beer. The one-liner is spewed every time K drinks so the lines drop into Repeat Territory almost immediately. And none of them are funny! Again, it's one of those, "Throw everything and the kitchen sink into this and maybe something will be good, or something! Maybe!"

Zombeer barely reaches the height of a "novelty game." You know, a game that's so bad it needs to be played to be believed, so if that's the bar you've set for your gaming dollars then spend away. Otherwise, don't bother. There are far better ways to play away a few hours.

- Aaron Simmer
Follow @EmpireArmchair

The Good:
- Good game for those with a low bar when it comes to spending entertainment dollars

The Bad:
- A spewing spray of pop culture references is kind of interesting for about five minutes
- Floaty movement and poor visceral feedback
- Gunplay doesn't even reach for Fun
- Cramming the game full of random crap didn't result in anything engaging