Zombie Rollers Review

Any game featuring the undead is not exactly a novel concept, and although Zombie Rollers doesn't have anything really deep to offer the genre, it's a diverting enough experience to keep your interests peaked. It's main draw is the ability to get into a temporarily indestructible zombie ball and mow down as many of these cretins as possible. Crush a bunch of zombies, save some humans, and rack up at least 15,000 points in the process and you progress to a new level. It's all a bunch of good fun for the first few minutes, but then the slight headaches start.

Credit the developers for giving us the chance to control the game by tilting our device, using the old thumb stick method, or by dragging a finger across the screen. Three options to play is great and it's this outside the box thinking which made me root for this zombie fest from the start. Unfortunately, trying to navigate your character away from a horde of flesh eating creatures is a complete nightmare in thumb stick and finger drag mode. The zombies are also pretty fast, and evading these suckers is an improbable task when faced with an imperfect control system. Thankfully, the adventure is much more manageable through tilt mode, since driving around the zombie ball is much more seamless. Although eluding the walking dead is still a frustrating experience under tilt mode, it definitely can be done.

To fully enjoy Zombie Rollers, you must be prepared for a slight challenge. Different zombie balls have different sort of advantages; if you jump inside a meat ball, your scoring and combo possibilities increase. If you hit a beach ball with another zombie ball, you can kill even more zombies in the process. Since your time inside each ball is less than thirty seconds, it's important to know the location of the next ball to use. If you just haphazardly roll through the streets without any type of plan, the zombies will surely eat you. Balls are not your only weapons of fury - by picking up "the bomb" you send a sizable blast radius which kills all the nearby undead, giving you a few peaceful seconds run to the next area. By using the "deep freeze," you automatically put the zombies on ice, and you can push these frozen creatures into other zombies, thereby terminating two zombies for the price of one.

Sal Moriarty, a shade obsessed, beret donning hipster with an annoying goatee, is your first playable character in the game, and you unlock more rollers, including a chimp named Ham, when your scores increase to 25,000. The real question lies if you get too frustrated with the game's difficulty level. This isn't a laid back, rack up points in an arbitrary fashion type of journey. Zombie Rollers needs a slice of strategy, a cool head, and most of all, coordination.

The Tim Burton/Danny Elfman inspired music behind the game, though catchy, is slowly getting on my last nerve. Coupled with my initial controlling problems, one would think Zombie Rollers would be a total miss. But the sheer rush at running over zombies and watching them go splat in the streets is a nice enough pleasure. And even if he's a hipster, Sal Moriarty knows how to roll.

App Store Link: Zombie Rollers for iPhone & iPad | By Chillingo Ltd | Price: $0.99 | Version: 1.0 | 35.5 MB | Rating 9+