Game review: Zombie Tsunami puts you in charge of the zombie horde

Of all the benefits that technology has gifted us, an excuse to ignore our families during the holidays is perhaps the greatest. Historically, we relied on the warmth and cheer *cough* of our families and friends to get us through the cold winter season. But no more! Now we can bask in the warm glow of our LCD screen of choice, while huddling alone in a dark corner.

This holiday season, I’ve ignored my family by playing Zombie Tsunami, the latest project from Mobigame.

Gameplay

Zombie Tsunami is a joyfully silly platform runner similar to the popular Jetpack Joyride. The goal of each round is to build up your zombie horde by eating the brains of civilians and avoiding obstacles. It shares Jetpack Joyride’s simple touch controls – touch to jump, that’s it.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoYVFgYSA0g

The simple gameplay doesn’t at first seem like it would lend the game a lot of replay value, but well-crafted missions and upgrade goals kept bringing me back. On iOS, the game utilizes Apple’s Game Center to coordinate challenges between friends, which is actually how I first discovered the game. One of my friend’s issued a challenge to me to beat his 52 brain score and off I went.

The game reacts to the size of your zombie horde by throwing more obstacles at you the larger your horde gets. Gather a horde of 30+ zombies and you’ll soon find it culled down to 3 or 4 by bombs and chasms that have been thrown in your way. This limiting keeps the game challenging and prevents players from just zerging through each round.

An in-game market provides power-ups, cosmetic changes for your zombies (hats), and other gameplay bonuses. These can either be purchased with coins your zombies have collected during each round or by purchasing coin packs from Mobigame.

I’m personally not a big fan of the free-to-play-buy-in-game-items model, but Mobigame’s store is well implemented and I never felt like I was being pushed to buy coins or that I couldn’t compete without them.

Availability & pricing

Zombie Tsunami is available for free on iOS devices running iOS 4.3 or later.

Final Thoughts

My only big complaint about Zombie Tsunami is the inability to sync stats, progress, and upgrades across iCloud to all my iDevices. Although this is nothing I would have expected just a few years ago, it’s such a common feature now that I’m annoyed when a game developer doesn’t implement it.

Otherwise, this is an excellent free-to-play game with a lot of replay value. While it’s by no means innovative, it’s a great take on the Jetpack Joyride formula and a good way to escape from your loved ones during the holidays.