You may have heard the term “zombie apocalypse” thrown around a lot over the past decade or so. It’s eaten up the interest of pop-culture in a slew of television series, movies, and big Triple-A gaming for quite some time now. Awesome Games Studio is riding that hype train with their latest zombie experience I, Zombie on the Nintendo Switch. But does its intentions leave the player’s hunger satisfied, or searching for something more?

The idea of I, Zombie is a simple one. Your main objective is to infect every civilian within the stage until they’re none left to infect. Each infected civilian becomes a part of your army which you then command with three separate actions; attack, follow and stop. You then strategically signal those commands in order to use your army to infect other civilians. Growing your army is important since you’ll be treating them as shields to protect yourself when traversing through waves of attacks from mobile armed guards and stationed turrets.

You won’t find a story here as the game is essentially just a cluster of pre-made stages for you to complete. The 30 main stages take place in a basic farm setting. There’s also an additional 10 “Winter Has Come” stages. You can tackle the 40 collective stages in any order you wish.  Snowmen are the only added element in those stages, which allow you to camouflage you and your army. Besides that, the only differences are cosmetic.

The game’s first few stages teach you the basics of how to operate your character and command your army. You’ll also be introduced to a majority of the enemies. After that, you’re on your own. Each stage should only take you a couple minutes making the game only about an hour or two to complete depending on your skill level. However, you can increase the challenge of the game by beating your time on each stage and losing a few zombies of your army as possible.

The game may be short, but there is a level creator which allows you to create, save, and upload your own ideas online, or locally onto your Switch. This can be seen as a positive since it allows for an infinite amount of levels for the community to come back to. However, I dabbled with the level creation tools and found the room for creativity to be pretty low. Even some of the highest-rated levels on the online servers were lacking any type of real challenge or integrity. Most were uninspired levels that felt like they were for the sake of just… being there.

The overall experience I had with I, Zombie was a lackluster one. The gameplay was great mechanically, but the art, sound, and challenge were lacking anything that made this experience a memorable one. There were only a couple stages where I felt a challenge, and those few puzzles didn’t give me a sense of accomplishment that was strong enough to make me want to stick around.