Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Invasão Zumbi


Another Brazilian game that my eyes were pleased to watch and my fingers happy to play. The mechanics is pretty basics. The game follows the “Tower defence” premise. You have to put some high technologic weapons against goddamn zombies. The art is pretty coherent and the flow is ok – only in the beginning.

1-      Let’s see the elements:
 
You got a map to place the weapons near the path where the zombies gonna walk. You have a menu with:

Money:  to buy weapons and stuff:
1. Basic Weapon
2. A Launcher
3. Something I don’t get it
4. An expensive missile button that explode all zombies on the screen
5. I think this is a paralysis gas
6. Repair tool
7. Upgrade Tool
8. Sell Tool
9. Pause game
10. Stop sound

3 maps with a path and a space for your weapons: City, desert and beach.

Enemies Zombies:
Man: Basic walking and easy to die
Woman: A little more faster but easy to die
Fat Woman: Medium to Die.
Clown car: faster and medium to die.
Crawler: Harder to die.

The enemies attack in groups. Apparently they follow some order of appearance, but I’m not so sure about it. I just feel that somehow they got faster with time.

The game is pretty ok, not fantastic creatively or revolutionary. It is modest and honest. There are some problems with it.



 2-      Main problems:
The game is unbalanced. Only in the beginning you gonna face some challenge. After this you have only to manage your weapons and wait a lot of time to the map changes. In fact I really don’t get if you have some certain amount of money to get, if you have to wait till the enemies sequence is over – long story short – I really don’t get the objective. You know, protect the fort till…??

Another thing is the weapons you have. I put some basics at the beginning. When I got some money I tried something that blast a blue wave of nothing. The problem here is that you have to guess what you are buying. It is just a button with a draw and you have to figure it out by yourself. There is no name appearing if you pass the mouse over it… nothing, any clues. You have to try. I put it there, so it blast it waves, but my basic weapons do the service. So I use the sell button and get rid of it.

So I tried the launcher. It’s godamn motherfucker. It is powerful, but slow. When the missile hits the ground the zombies are dancing in my fort. So I sold it. Then I tried the cloud icon. And it appears an animation of a green smoke and I don’t get at first, at second I guess it paralysis the zombies for a while. After that I tried the nuke button and do what you might think it would. Explode everything.

The real deal of the game is to buy the basic weapon and upgrade it once (you can upgrade it once at all). A little strategy and BANG! You will build an insurmountable path of death for the undead – what? And well, you have only to manage and wait the moment it will teleports you to another map.
And dude, it take a huuuuge while to this happens. With time the enemies get boring and repeated. Maybe they get faster or maybe I was getting mad and have this impression. But the fact is, you can manage all the hordes with a simple strategy you did in the beginning. You don’t need even to use special weapons or stuff.

Another problem happens when you place the weapons in the bottom line at the map. The status of your weapon appears out of screen  ~so~ you can’t see the status gauge of your own weapon. It is pretty easy to fix this although. Just slightly raise the map - and it is done. ;)

But this also happens when you place a weapon behind another one as you can see in the image below.

Tips for the future?
The buttons have some similarities with facebook way of gaming. And the game could be awesome for facebook with a few modifications. You could arm your own map and wait for friends to try to invade it. But this is for another time. ;)

The game was developed by David de Siqueira and Diego Cordeiro Barboza. Great works dudes. Just a little balance and some fix and it will be great. =)

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