I’m a huge fan of zombies, and this is an amazing time for zombie lovers. The Walking Dead (both the TV show and the Telltale series), Shaun of the Dead, countless video games… There are so many amazing pieces of zombie media! It was with that love of zombies that I dove into I, Zombie by Awesome Games Studio on the Switch. This is a small little strategic game that runs from $2-$5 depending on platform and will challenge your mind (and your patience) more than your reflexes.
The premise is simple – you’re a zombie that not only wants brains and to turn others into zombies, you’re also somehow in charge of the other zombies around and can make them stop in place, follow you or attack the nearest human. In fact, aside from regular movement those are the only actions in the game (aside from a button to reset the level), and you’ll use them all carefully to convert fodder (like scientists and unarmed humans) so that you can ultimately make everyone in the area (including the armed soldiers) zombies like you.
The game is broken up into a tutorial, 20 main levels and 10 more winter-themed levels. The levels get progressively harder as you go, but the gameplay is the same – carefully figure out which order to attack the humans while leaving as many zombies alive at the end as possible. With the exception of a few time-based levels where you’ll stealthily run past super soldiers, you’ll get up to 3 stars per level based on how many zombies are alive at the end. While you can certainly beat a level with no zombies but yourself, you lose the level if you die (even if you have a horde of zombies left), so you’ll have to balance keeping yourself alive with keeping as many other zombies alive as well. This is especially true when there get to be fewer fodder humans, or none at all, and you need to carefully take out soldiers and then use them to take out more soldiers. It has a sort of Katamari Damacy effect where you and your horde get bigger and bigger until you can “roll over” even large groups of soldiers!
That’s when things go right, at least. Unfortunately it took a while to get the controls down and would tell zombies to stop when I went to attack soldiers instead of attacking with me, leading me to get shot to death and restart the level. This gets annoying when you’re on a level that requires really precise timing that can be entirely undone by a single wrong button press or a soldier with lucky aim; every time you’re shot you slow down and after a bullet or two it’s basically impossible to move. Soldiers are also impossible to sneak up on from behind: if you’re within the soldier’s attack radius in any direction they’ll stop and shoot at you or your fellow zombies until they die or you’re back out of range. Once you and your horde are safe you can stay hidden and you’ll heal after a few seconds though, which is definitely handy. It’s also worth mentioning that this luring of soldiers to stop and shoot at you can be a worthy strategy when several soldiers are walking together, allowing you to separate them for an easier assault later!
The level design is fairly varied, and after the first few levels they require a good amount of strategy to complete. This is both a blessing and a curse – retrying levels makes these 20 levels last a lot longer, but no matter how many stars you earn you cannot skip levels! If you get stuck on level 16 you can’t play levels 17-20 even if you 3-starred levels 1-15. This sadly goes for the bonus winter levels as well; even though they start off easy and get harder like the original levels you can’t even experience them if you don’t complete the first 20 levels. That was the case for me, I ended up watching a walkthrough for two of the levels and then just gave up on level 19 due to how frustrating it became. I did watch YouTube videos of the remaining levels and the winter levels, but it was a shame I couldn’t play them myself, they looked really fun!
The game also has a rather nifty level editor, and while you need online access to use it (either to save your own levels or download others) it’s a nice little addition. I tried a few of the top rated community levels and they were all fun enough in their various ways, although none of them were any kind of difficult whatsoever. The system could use some work; as it is you can browse by newest, friends or highest rated, and once you play a level you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down but there’s no leaderboard of any sort with them. After restarting the game, the levels I had previously downloaded, played and ranked don’t even show in any way that I’ve done any of that, let alone my previous times/zombies at the end of the level, so it would be far too easy to accidentally replay levels already beaten. On the other hand, making levels is quite straightforward, and the system is rather intuitive. If you have lots of friends on the platform you get the game on, you can easily play one another’s levels and brag to one another about how well you did (outside the game, there’s no messaging within the game of course).
For $2-$5 (not even on sale!) it’s hard to say this isn’t a worthwhile game to grab. However, I only got about an hour and a half worth of gameplay from it, and a fair deal of that was frustrating as I failed in annoying ways repeatedly. There were several times I felt smart for devising a plan to complete a level, though, and maybe as more people make their own levels it’ll be worth coming back. More than anything I hope the developers add the ability to unlock levels based on the number of stars; as it is I’m stuck and would love a reason to go back and do better on older levels. If you like puzzle games this is a hard one to pass up, especially if it’s on sale!
Note: I received a free review copy of this game for the Nintendo Switch in exchange for my honest opinion.