Zombie Driver

During the delicious Steam sales that occurred at Thanksgiving and Christmas, I snagged Zombie Driver for a paltry $2.50. As it turns out, that was about how much this short but simple game was worth.

Zombie Driver is a mix between Crazy Taxi, Left 4 Dead, and GTA 2. The game is viewed in the top down style of GTA 2 and has you control your car with either the keyboard or a gamepad (I tried both and they each worked fine). With your mouse, you can control the camera and shoot your weapon.

The gameplay is relatively basic, you are tasked with driving to a handful of locations, clearing the zombies out that have taken up residence, and then transporting the survivors inside back to the base. Along the way, expect to run into piles upon piles of zombies. Most merely swarm your car, some throw toxic barrels at you, and the nastiest explode when you get close causing massive damage to your car.

To kill (re-kill?) said zombies, you can either shoot them with one of the various weapons you can obtain or you can merely run them over. The weapons themselves were definitely my least favorite part of the entire game. While the weapon variety was actually pretty decent (machine gun, rocket launcher, flamethrower, and rail gun), just about everything else about the weapons was not.

First of all, the game is VERY stingy with ammo. After picking up a weapon, it's possible to burn through all of the ammo just clearing out the first group of zombies you run across. I'm not kidding; you get 5-7 rockets/rail slugs and perhaps 5-10 seconds worth of continuous machine gun/flamethrower fire per pickup. What that means is that I spent at least half if not three fourths of my time without ammo just ramming zombies.

I think I could have been more forgiving of the low ammo counts if I could have picked up all the guns at once, however the game limits you to carrying a single gun at a time. If I could have waded into each battle with a full stockpile of all the ammo types, I think the game would have been MUCH more enjoyable.

The game provides 5 or so different cars (although the bus pretty much makes all the other ones pointless) along with three different car upgrades (speed, armor, and ramming). You can also upgrade each of your weapons three times. Money for upgrading is obtained by completing both primary and secondary objectives in missions. The game just barely unlocks the ability to upgrade ahead of your cash flow, meaning that unless you try to upgrade most of your cars you can pretty much always afford to buy the best of everything. I thought the upgrades added a bit of flavor to the game despite being relatively uninspired.

The weakest thing in the whole game is definitely the story. The beginning and ending cutscenes have no voice over and the briefings that occur between missions are nothing more than easily skippable walls of flavor text. Basically, there was a zombie outbreak and you are slowly trying to rescue people that will supposedly help. At least I *think* that's what it was about.

At the end of the day, Zombie Driver provided me with 3 or so hours of pure enjoyment. The game is fun for what it is and really doesn't try to be anything it's not. I would easily recommend it to anybody who could pick it up cheaply via Steam. I certainly wouldn't pay more than $10 for it and even that feels like a stretch due to the lack of content. It's definitely an enjoyable romp and can make for an excellent homework/work/life diversion.