The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Well, last Steam Sale, I bought Atom Zombie Smasher, the newest joint from Blendo games, the guy who did the completely awesome Flotilla. I loved that! I wanted to try this! So I did.

There’s a lot of nice stuff here, but ultimately, I think Flotilla is a superior experience.

Basically, like Flotilla, Atom Zombie Smasher, at it’s core, is one type of combat randomized and thrown at you again and again. You are given an area of city. In this area are Zombies and Civilians. You have to land helicopters and lift out as many good guys as possible, while setting up Marines and traps and stuff to slow the Zombies so you can actually get to the Civilians while they’re alive. The game randomizes the kind of units you can have for each mission. There are some that are super useful, like Artillery and the Marines, but there are some that are useful, but not nearly as useful as other units and make the challenge quite hard if you get them, like Roadblocks. In any case, you set them up before the mission, but some units are active, and you can reorganize and regroup as you play, moving the Marines around, re-aiming your snipers, changing the landing zone of your helicopter, and so on. You can retry as many times as you want, too, so if your strategy is bad, you can adjust.
Sometimes, it’s just impossible, though. Areas have infection ratings, and if you go into a high-infection area with a shitty loadout, you are just kind of all-around screwed. Don’t do something higher than one if you have roadblocks! Just don’t.

The game runs on a scoreboard. Clear an area, and you get points. Fail, the Zombies get points. Infected parts of the map generate points as well every turn, but liberated areas generate points for you. The first to fill up their meter wins. It’s important to focus on keeping the Zombie scoring capability down by clearing out higher-level missions so that outbreaks don’t fuck you over as much. It’s an interesting dynamic, to be sure, and eventually you’re rescuing scientists to upgrade things, and killing Zombies to charge orbital barrages… it’s fun.

Like Flotilla, though, eventually you figure it out. Once you’ve figured out the combat in Flotilla, it’s pretty trivial: you either win, or you are so outgunned you were going to die no matter what, really. Atom Zombie Smasher is much the same way. Once you figure out how to keep the Zombie meter under control, and how to use the units effectively, no encounter is really hard. However, Flotilla was much more random. There were many random events, and several storyline plots you could fall into as you played. The game felt fresher for a ton longer because of that, because I wanted to see all the content. Atom Zombie Smasher advances on a very clear timeline, and that wacky “what’s going to happen?” thing just isn’t there. Once you’ve mastered the combat, that’s pretty well all there is, unfortunately. There are little storyline bits that show up at random, but they don’t swing your game at all. They’re just kind of funny. It’s a shame.

To it’s credit, though, Atom Zombie Smasher has a ton of options to customize your experience. You can make the game super hard, super easy, or whatever you’d like. Would you rather pick units for each mission? You can turn that on. Would you like to take less units into each mission? Possible. There are tons of checkboxes to make it fun for yourself, which I do appreciate and got some mileage out of. There’s also a super-interesting Development Diary that unlocks the first time you complete a runthrough, and it’s cool to see how much work went into this game and how it came to be.

Anyway, it’s a great little indie game by a cool guy. It’s totally worth picking up. But if you were only to get one Blendo game, I would still suggest Flotilla. There’s just more game there. Still, I can’t wait to see what else he makes. He’s pretty awesome.