 Review By: Siou Choy |
Developer: | InLight Entertainment |
| Publisher: | Ignition Entertainment | |
| Genre: | Action | |
| ESRB: | Everyone 10+ | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | N/A | |
| Buy Now: |   |
OK, someone out there must have really loved 1985’s Return of the Living Dead.
I remember being singularly unimpressed by the mid-80’s comedy-horror hybrid (which spawned similar genre bastardizations such as the immortal “C.H.U.D. 2: Bud the C.H.U.D”), but unlike most kids weaned on crappy 80’s slasher flicks, I never felt this particular mélange was meant to gel. Comedy is comedy, horror is horror, and never the twain should meet.
Nonetheless, I seem to be of the minority opinion here, as few if any fright flicks have managed to keep their tongues removed from cheek in the ensuing 20+ years of celluloid wasteland that ensued. Faster than you could say “more BRAINS!” folks with little or no affinity for the style started cranking out mediocre to lousy rollercoaster rides of laughs mixed with “chills” (or more accurately, Freudian anal explosive gross-outs) – from the good (Re-Animator) to the bottom of the barrel (Troma films, the collected oeuvre of Eli Roth).
Now this somewhat lamentable admixture has bled its way into the world of videogaming, with the advent of Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys. Thankfully, InLight managed to make something both cute and amusing out of what generally proves both a dire and ponderous proposition. If you lean a bit towards the morbid and are looking for a harmless laugh, this one should be right up your alley.
Given its apparent indebtedness, at least in part, to the ethos of Mars Attacks, Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys starts out in appropriate comic book fashion…literally. You “read” the comic panels by holding the DS sideways, while dialogue and text is read to you. There follows a brief tutorial which guides you through the characteristics and usage of each playable zombie. In a cute stylistic touch, you get to “break the third wall” a bit, as even the dialogue boxes are climbable.
Here’s the story: the world is being attacked by an alien race of sentient brains with faces (shades of Fiend Without a Face, or better yet, Brain from Planet Arous!). When the military bungles the job once again, Earth’s last line of defense is a strange one…in fact, as it happens, the aliens’ worst nightmare, a group of brain sucking teenage zombies (why they’re teenagers, I can’t figure for the…ahem…life of me)!
Posted: 2008-07-05 09:20:20 PST