I am going to start by saying that I love zombie games. Well, I love most zombie games and Rock Zombie was not one of them.  I went into this game hoping for a pretty great zombie slaying experience and ended up being quite disappointed.  There is just not enough good in the game to outweigh the mediocrity of the rest of the experience.

First, let me outline some of the very few things that were going for the game.  The music in Rock Zombie was ok.  Not great but just ok and on top of that it got a little repetitive during the levels.  The motorcycle sequence was also a nice change in scenery but that was implemented poorly, I will go into detail on this later.  The story and style that the developers were aiming for was interesting as well but those were also underwhelming, and again I will elaborate.  While the enemies didn’t vary often, it was nice when some new enemies made appearances in later levels.  And that’s it….everything that I felt were ok while playing Rock Zombie.  Now for everything else.

 

 

The graphics, animations, and sound design were all average.  There was nothing special about any of it.  Even the comic styled cut scenes players will have to flip through don’t look great and sometimes I struggled to understand what exactly I was looking at.  Also, the dialogue in these comic cut scenes was not the best.  While most of it read ok in terms of grammar, occasionally it faltered and did not read very well.  These gripes may not bring down a game entirely but these issues combined with others that effect gameplay can really make for a bad experience overall.

Some of my biggest issues with Rock Zombie lie within the gameplay.  The hit detection seemed off at times.  It seemed like there were times I’d be swinging away and just not landing hits. Other times AI zombie characters just seemed to stand there and take what I was dishing out.  I also found a few times that I was unable to collect coins because of invisible barriers.  Additionally, levels automatically end preventing me from exploring the final area in order to collect the remaining coins.  Then after each level the recap screen appears to compile my score and I desperately wanted to skip through this screen but am continuously forced to wait for the screen to populate, a small gripe but this is a common feature.  Simply said, there is not enough variety in the gameplay and it needed more polish.  Lastly, the motorcycle level.

I did say that I enjoyed the motorcycle sequence for the change of scenery and it was a good design decision.  Unfortunately, the instructions in the tutorial prior to the level didn’t quite jive with what players encounter during the level.  The goal in this level is to run over as many zombies as possible while avoiding walls, cars, lava, and poisonous areas.  During the level though, zombies were placed in poison or directly in front of or behind obstacles making it sometimes impossible to run over the zombies without taking some sort of damage in the process.  The controls for the motorcycle are very simple but at the same time very bad and made it difficult to control how far left or right the motorcycle is traveling.  So the motorcycle idea was a good one but just needed a bit of work.

I just simply did not find enough good aspects in Rock Zombie to recommend this to another gamer.  There may be some players out there who enjoy side-scrolling arcade beat-em-ups (I am one of them) and may enjoy this but I found the experience underwhelming overall.  To be completely honest if the title didn’t have zombie in it, I may not have been interested in reviewing it to begin with.  I love zombie games and rock music so I thought I’d give it a shot.  How could I go wrong with that combination?  Apparently Rock Zombie did a very good job at proving me wrong.  While there are zombies and lots of them, players would be better off shambling somewhere else to get their zombie fix.