Zombieville 2: Zombie-Blasting Fun!

Game developer Mika Mobile has done it again. Their newest game, Zombieville 2, is a combination of brilliant gameplay, animation and responsive controls that translate to an awesome experience.

While the game builds on the previous Zombieville, it adds many new elements and improves on others. The graphics have had an awesome refresh that definitely improves the whole feel for the game, and the character customization has been greatly expanded as well. Let’s see what it’s got!

Starting Up

The start screen shows our hero riding along in a helicopter, trusty shotgun by his side. The options page contains a short list of settings: You can enable or disable iCloud or Gamecenter, and turn SFX and music on or off. For those of you who like playing multiplayer, there’s the option to turn voice chat on or off as well.

Selecting Gamecenter brings up what you’d expect: high scores and achievements. But enough delay — let’s get to the interesting part: the game! I hit play, then Solo, because we’ll take a look at the multiplayer a bit later.

Equipping Your Character

Starting off, you can already see one of the awesome features of the game: tons and tons of customization. What you see here is about half of the many available characters. Want to play as a ninja? Got it. What about a SWAT team member, or a cook? A guy in a hazmat suit? It’s got them all and many more. Needless to say, blasting zombies with a shotgun is a whole lot more fun when you’re Santa Claus.

Next? Weapons, of course. How could you survive a zombie apocalypse without them? Again, there are a huge number of weapons available for your disposal – everything from pistols to shotguns to a giant electric telsa cannon. I counted a total of 19 weapons/tools, and as you’ll soon see each of these can be upgraded up to five times to increase its power. Picking weapons isn’t only a question of preference, but strategy. For example, the bat is extremely low damage, but knocks enemies further away so that you can attack them with a more powerful weapon. The rocket launcher can vaporize large groups of zombies, but ammo is scarce. There are also items that are more akin to tools than weapons, such as med-kits or flashbang grenades that stun the enemy.

Selecting a weapon will bring you to a menu that allows you to buy it if you don’t already have it, and equip it or upgrade it if you already bought it. There’s a short description of the weapon that gives you an idea of how it’ll work, but the best way to get a feel for it is to actually use it for a round or two. Upgrading weapons is a crucial part of gameplay; as you advance to harder stages, you won’t be able to survive unless your weapons are more powerful. Upgrades range from increased damage or ammo to unique traits, such as dual-wielding uzis or a faster charge rate for the telsa gun.

In addition to weapons, Zombieville 2 has a host of skills that boost specific traits of your character. The ninja skill, for example, increases the damage of all melee weapons. The radioactive skill makes it so that your character slowly regenerates health at all times, which is super helpful. Upgrading a skill increases the potency of that particular skill, so the level 1 ninja skill won’t make nearly as much of a difference as the upgraded level 5 ninja skill would.

Choosing a Level

The level selection screen is where you can choose how difficult you want the round to be – the later levels have a greater variety of zombies, more of them, and last longer. You can’t access the later levels until you’ve killed a certain number of zombies — this is a helpful restriction that’ll encourage you to get better weapons and skills until you can handle the harder rounds.

Gameplay

The controls of Zombieville 2 are simple to use and very effective. A virtual joystick on the left controls movement, while the three buttons on the right are for your weapons. Having three separate buttons for each weapon you currently have equipped allows you to instantly use the weapon you want to use instead of having to switch: this is much more useful than you’d think. The top left corner displays your ammo and health; on the opposite corner is your current score. In the middle is the all-important timer: when this timer runs out, a helicopter arrives and you can escape the zombie hordes.

Until then, however, you need to stay alive. Zombies drop money, so you’re going to want to make sure to grab that so you can buy and upgrade weapons at the end of each round. Random crates, parking meters and cones litter the street, and destroying these will often reveal ammo. To survive a round, you need to find the proper balance between killing zombies and finding ammo, as well as learning to keep moving so you don’t get surrounded.

You’ve survived a round! Once you jump on that helicopter and escape the zombies, a “Mission Complete!” screen will appear showing your final score, how much money you’ve collected, and some interesting stats like how accurate you were or how much health you had when you finished. Tap to go back to the selection screen so you can change your weapons, skills or character, and start another round!

Multiplayer

There really isn’t much to say about multiplayer since it works just about exactly as you’d expect it to. Start a game on Gamecenter, invite a friend and you can both play together. If you’ve enabled voice chat in the options page, you can talk to each other just as easily as if you were on the phone. Even on the rather slow connection I used, multiplayer was relatively lag-free.

Conclusion

Mika Mobile has truly created a beauty of a game with Zombieville 2. The graphics (especially on a iOS device with the Retina display) are stunning, the style is charming and the animations are fluid and realistic (in a comic sort of way). If you’ve been craving a side-scrolling, zombie-blasting, comic-styled game, look no further; this is it.