TyReview

I was excited for this PSN game since I first heard about it in late 2008, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it turned out pretty well as a final product. I have several issues with the game, however, that are frustrating enough at times to disappoint but largely the game stands tall as a fun way to spend some time doing the most fun activity of slaughtering hordes of zombies trying to eat your brains.

There’s not much story behind Burn, Zombie Burn so I won’t get into why the main character, Bruce, is stuck slaughtering zombies for some sort of purpose. It plays mostly like an arcade game, with 6 maps to unlock and 3 modes for each of these maps. The modes are a basic, unlimited “free-play” mode that ends when you lose your three starting lives, a timed mode where some of the powerups dropped are time extensions, and a “protect Daisy” mode where you have to both fight for your own life as well as protect your girlfriend Daisy sitting in a car somewhere on the map. There are also a substantial collection of challenges with specific rules that are fun for a change of pace when you get tired of the three main modes. There is co-op play available for all modes, putting a second character in control of Bruce’s brother Bruno for some sweet co-op action that makes any game much more fun.

Your performance at the end of each map and mode combination is given a score that you see rise throughout your playtime, and a medal (bronze, silver and gold) awarded based on your points earned. There is also trophy support, which is nice to finally see standard in every released PS3 game throughout 2009. The medals are extremely tough to earn, even after hours of learning the structure of the awarded points, giving much replay value and reward when those blasted medals are finally in your hands. Trophies will be discussed more thoroughly in a later post.

The weapons available for zombie genocide in Burn, Zombie Burn! are varied and each are fun to use in their own right. You start with a pistol (and a torch), and can get a chainsaw, lawnmower, baseball or cricket bat, uzi, gatling gun, shotgun, flamethrower, dance gun and brain gun. The chainsaw is amazing to use (until it runs out of ammo quickly), while the bat takes more skill but has one hit charged up shots and unlimited ammo. The uzi is not very powerful but can shoot zombies incessantly while the shotgun can kill 5 or 6 zombies at a time but must be manually shot and leaves you open to flanking attacks much more. The gatling gun is like a suped up uzi that’s extremely powerful and has lots of ammo but the shielded zombies that are usually around once you get access to it are nearly impossible to take out with any ranged weapon, even this beast of a weapon. The lawnmower is like using 4 chainsaws at once, while at the same time stunning any zombie in range while they get slowly sucked into its spinning blades of death. Watch out for the diseased zombies those that take away a little of your health whenever you’re near or the exploders that will hurt you severely. There are health pickups, tnt upgrades, tnt range upgrades, tnt pickups, speed boosts and ammo that all drop from dead zombies, so the arsenal at your disposal is more than sufficient to take out the undead.

The mechanics of the game are also extremely solid. The way the points are calculated is somewhat complicated but I’ll try to do my best. For every zombie you kill, you get a certain amount of points. If you kill a zombie with the baseball bat, you get 50 points. If instead, you kill it with the chainsaw, you get something like 35 points and if you kill it with TNT, you get 100 points. So the way you dispose of the zombies is integral to achieving a high score. This is further multiplied by the amount of burning zombies on the map. Every time you play, you start out with a secondary weapon: the torch. This can later be upgraded to a much more efficient flamethrower with its own drawbacks, but the basic idea is to light zombies on fire, and the amount of zombies lit on fire at the same time is multiplied by the points you get every time you kill a zombie based on what weapon you use for a final score given for every zombie killed. For example, if you have 10 zombies on fire before you kill an eleventh zombie that is not on fire with the bat, you get 50 x 10 = 500 points for that kill. If instead you kill it with TNT, you get 100 x 10 = 1000 points, twice as much as killing it with a bat.

The controls are one of the weak points of an otherwise extremely detailed, passionately crafted zombie killing game. Although the game takes the general appearance of a twin stick shooter a la Super Stardust HD, the controls are awkwardly presented for the sake of a lock-on system that newcomers will rejoice for while the purists reject outright. Rather than allow you to move with the left stick and aim/shoot with the right stick like the aforementioned twin-stick shooters, you instead move with the left stick, strafe with the left trigger if desired, or lock on to the nearest enemy by pressing the L1 button. While this works intelligently and dynamically changes targets based on proximity as you run around the map, you must hold the L1 button while doing so the entire time. The right stick, after already holding down the L1 button, then changes into a mode where you change the locked-on target, and with hundreds of zombies surrounding you, this actually ends up being smooth enough to mimic a twin stick shooter almost entirely. Despite this questionable design decision, the controls are adequate as long as you accept them and, if you can adapt, rarely are you unable to actually accomplish something simply because of the awkward controls. It may even be a saving grace to have the controls the way they are for the sake of newcomers and significant others so that you can play the game with them in co-op mode.

There are a few issues I couldn’t help but notice while playing the game that are more frustrating than game-breaking as is the case with bugs in other games. One of the most frustrating to me is when you are running around with your torch, the game mentions this and it is an important mechanic that non-burning zombies will run away from you because they are afraid of fire. This works for the most part, and when being overwhelmed by freshly spawned zombies you can run straight through them, torch in hand and locked on to every nearest zombie, burning them and saving yourself along the way. However, every other time I do this, I notice I get hit by some errant zombie along my path. Upon closer inspection I realized that if a zombie decides to pre-empt your burning spree by attacking before you are in “scare zombie with torch” range, the animation will finish and you are in danger of being hit. I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, but considering that already burning zombies are a constant, faster threat than new zombies and cant be scared away with fire, I would think it would be okay to simply allow you to run through zombies with your torch with no threat to your health.

My last problem with the game is the way the medals and scoring work. I’m not entirely sure but I believe the TNT with its base score of 100 points per zombie killed is twice the amount of the next highest scoring weapon, the bat. Also, with the way a burning zombie horde with TNT combo works, you can farm regular zombies for TNT, burning zombies for TNT upgrades to get proximity TNT or remote-detonated TNT, and then you’re pretty much set to rack up tons of points by lighting 100 zombies on fire, then dropping a TNT to blow them all up. Since you blow all of the flaming zombies up at the same time, you get a much higher combo multiplier for each zombie than if you use a chainsaw or such and take them out one by one. This is all well and good and makes for a lot of fun, but it is somewhat disappointing to know that every other weapon, no matter how fun it is to use, is delegated to a “keep me alive” status or “TNT farming instrument”, since slaughtering zombies with normal weapons gets you nowhere near the amount of points as TNT combos. With gold medals as high as they are, reaching multiple millions compared to the couple thousand for the bronze medals in each stage, it is an exercise in futility to try and get a high score using anything but TNT combos it seems.

Although it is somewhat unfair to criticize a game for what it didn’t include, I will also mention that the game could be several times more excellent if it included online multiplayer for it’s co-operative mode. It would be great fun to be able to play this game with my friends over the PSN instead of being limited to the people who can come over and visit.

Overall, I am very satisfied with Burn, Zombie Burn! because of the fun factor, replay value, challenge, depth and charm of a game based around zombie massacre. It also screams of being produced by an independent developer that I am more than happy to support for a budget PSN title compared to a heavily licensed, mass market, expensive game by a faceless corporation. It is well worth your money and you would do well to go to your local PSN and buy it right now, especially if you enjoy zombie movies or games because if there’s one thing Burn, Zombie Burn! does perfectly, it’s slaughtering zombies.

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