 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: |   |
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present, your zombies!
- Zack “Half-pipe” Boyd, a midget skater type (who has the most amusing brain eating style, but turns out to be the least maneuverable of the three),
- Lori (nee Lisa) “Lefty (eye)” Lopez (hahaha…remember that loser? “Unpretty” indeed…at least this one doesn’t set her boyfriend’s home on fire or try to run down hapless natives),
- and Finnegan “Fins” Magee, an inexplicably mutated octopoid…thing.
Each zombie has his or her own special ability which is necessary to get through given parts of the game that would be otherwise impassable. You can switch between the three teenage zombies at will, either by tapping on the desired zombie with your stylus or by pressing on the L or R buttons.
Scattered body parts are found throughout the game. Once you collect enough of these, you’re given a strange mini game of sorts where you have to join the parts together to form a body, while being yelled at by the dismembered corpse in question. Seriously, folks, I’m not making this up. Needless to say, this is not as easy of a (gruesome) task as it should be since the body tends to inexplicably float in circles. Worse, the parts don’t seem to move properly as you drag them over to the torso with the stylus, and the half-formed body has a tendency to shake itself apart. It’s like trying to put together a model during the spin cycle in a washing machine. When you finally manage to connect the body parts, your “unhealth bar” is fully restored (isn’t “restoring a lack of health” something of an oxymoron?). Said “unhealth bar” is also refilled throughout the game by smashing alien brains and eating them. Yum!
If you haven’t been reading this article thus far, and just dropped in on paragraph 10, you probably would have assumed a game filled with zombies would be dark in color (or at least a moldering green). Yet, surprisingly enough to the one or two folks actually fitting that description, Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys is both bright and colorful in design. Those folks might also be shocked to find out that it’s cute and mildly amusing in a grim sort of way. The rest of us will yell at me for repeating myself to the point of redundancy, but tough!
Controls are simple and the game is a pretty straightforward platformer. You can easily breeze through the game in a sitting or two.
Having eaten (calf) brains for a gag once, I can say that I just don’t get the appeal of the soft, spongy organ to zombies. Of course, there really is no filmic or literary precedent I’m aware of, beyond the aforementioned unimpressive mid 80’s horror-comedy Return of the Living Dead, where zombies actually eat brains per se…they tend to be more omnivorous (if they eat people in the first place – I’ve seen plenty of flicks where they seem to have no appetite whatsoever). But somehow I doubt the folks working on such a goofy, morbid-yet-cute and essentially harmless venture as Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys are going to be all that steeped in their zombie lore. All this to say, who really cares about the niggling details, as long as the end result is amusing enough to lay a few bucks down. BRAIIIINS!
Bottom Line:
Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys is a straightforward and simple platformer with a twist. Your heroes are brain sucking zombies fighting off an alien race of brains in the defense of a hapless and otherwise defenseless earth. And hey, who doesn’t like zombies?
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 6.8 |
Posted: 2008-07-05 09:20:20 PST