Zombotron – Review (PC)
For a time zombies were everywhere. You could hardly see a movie or play a game without witnessing an undead creature shamble across the screen. But recently zombies seem to have faded from the public consciousness completely and I would even go as far to say that people seem to be sick of them. So you can imagine my surprise when Ant.Karlov announced their first premiere title, Zombotron, a 2D action adventure game set in a world of zombies, robots, and aliens.
In Zombotron you play as Blaze Rush, a mercenary sent to an alien planet in search of the source of a distress call. But soon after your arrival, the story changes to one of survival and a desperate attempt to repair your ship. That’s all I can tell you about the story of Zombotron. Not because it’s incredibly complex or because I didn’t have a chance to see its payoff, but because after a certain point it becomes incoherent ramblings with absolutely no point of reference. The few characters you meet throughout the game often try to expand on the world but they might as well be speaking gibberish because the game never tries to explain what they’re talking about.
The only characters in Zombotron that I could understand and or tolerate were Blaze himself and Ash, his AI companion. I really enjoyed their back and forth and dynamic. Ash is the witty deadpan one and Blaze is the gun-toting sarcastic lead. Sadly, even their relationship became strained after hearing the same jokes over and over again.
Once I realized the story was going nowhere, I thought that gameplay would pick up the slack and pull Zombotron forward… and it did for quite some time. With a variety of different guns, bombs, and melee weapons – there was always something new to try out in combat. If you’re running low on ammo, try pushing crates and barrels over onto enemies, or lead them into another enemy type and watch them tear each other to shreds.
The only detriment when it comes to combat is your movement in hairy situations. I freduently found myself falling into pits or missing small platforms because I felt like the character was moving under water. While jumping specifically, Blaze feels especially hard to control. The easiest way to de-incentivize exploration is making your character feel like millions of pounds of stone and require tight platforming.
Even when you can manage traversal of the levels, there’s little incentive to do so other than small chests containing loot and ammo. In most situations this would be the perfect reason to explore in a world of scarce resources. But many times instead of finding a loot box you’re treated to a vending machine containing things such as guns, ammo, and healing equipment. Once again – sounds normal. Where Zombotron takes a big side step is not including any compare system and the lack of item descriptions. When items are in your inventory you can see their damage output, rate of fire, and many other attributes, but when they’re in these machines the only thing you can see is the items name and some flavor text. Because of this, whenever I’d come across one of these machines or a piece of equipment while I had a full inventory, I’d just have to ignore it.
The best part of Zombotron and its saving grace is its art style. Each and every character and object throughout my playthrough was beautiful and obviously hand crafted. The only art style I can compare it to is that showcased in the Steamworld series of games.
In my roughly seven-hour playthrough of Zombotron, I had a lot of fun running and gunning the beautifully crafted residents of this alien world. But that was quickly eclipsed by clunky movement, bad storytelling/world building, and issues like dropping your held items when you respawn at a checkpoint.
Zombotron was provided by the publisher/developer but this didn’t sway the outcome of the review in any way.
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
