Block Zombies! Review: Night of the Living Legos

Thanks, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1. Thanks for your addictive gameplay. Thanks for your stupid, catchy song. Thanks for creating a template that countless mindless, shambling hordes of games have imitated, and shamelessly refused to improve upon. The twin-stick shooter may be the most prolific genre represented in Xbox Live Indie Games, but most are redundant experiences that aren’t even worth Microsoft’s server space. But every so often a game like Block Zombies! comes around, shuffles the pieces up just enough, and mixes in a few new wrinkles to come out with something that feels fresh and fun.

Yes, Block Zombies! is another zombie twin-stick shooter, and yes it apes the voxel style that Minecraft returned to the limelight, but you know what? It totally works. The game’s carefree visual style and upbeat tempo makes Block Zombies! an absolute delight to play. It’s like you’re a  kid wandering through a Lego playground that just so happens to be infested with cubical zombies who explode into tiny pieces when killed.

The bane of the twin-stick shooter is isolation. The vast majority of them keep you camped up in a constricted area and force you to fire away mindlessly against increasingly powerful waves of foes until you bite the bullet. Games like Geometry Wars and Radiangames’ Ballistic find ways to pull it off, but the vast majority grow tedious and boring within a few minutes. Block Zombies! gives a gigantic rectangular middle finger to that isolation and plops you into an enormous town and basically gives you free rein to go wherever you want.

Of course, if you want to actually progress through the game, you’ll have to use the map at the bottom of the screen and move from mission point to mission point while fending off unending mobs of undead. This is where the game really breaks down, sadly, because the actual missions are extremely basic and alternate between sucking the energy out of ginormous green crystals and defeating a trio of boss zombies. A greater variety to what you’re actually doing when you aren’t blowing the heads off zombies would have helped it feel a little less disposable and make it easier to play for longer lengths of time at once. Without that variety, the only reason to keep playing is to beef up your arsenal with the upgrade parts that enemies randomly drop. They allow you to increase the effectiveness of your modest arsenal in reducing menacing zombies into humble blocks.

Despite the lack of variety and the generally repetitive structure, Block Zombies! makes a lot of smart design choices that keep the controller glued to your hands. The game autosaves after each mission, and if you die, you’ll instantly respawn at the previous checkpoint before you even have time to get groan about your death. You won’t even lose any of the weapon upgrades you’ve acquired since you hit the last checkpoint. The super quick respawns and checkpoint-to-checkpoint mission structure give the game an immediacy that helps it keep a lot of energy. It’s always clear where to go next and you don’t really have anything distracting you along the way. I just wish there was something more exciting at the end of the tunnel.

For a game that is always ‘go, go, go’ it may not be surprising that Block Zombies! has a problem maintaining the intensity. The entire adventure can be completed in about an hour or so, and it does tend to feel pretty same-y after about 20 minutes. Although the landscape is wide open and you can run wherever you want, the corn fields, small towns and graveyards all tend to blur together after a while. The only wrinkle in the formula comes with a bizarre underwater segment toward the end that slows your speed to the point where a Romero zombie could chase you down. As you might imagine, that’s not exactly the most exciting alteration to the game. A more robust leveling system with actual experience and modifications to your character, along with a better crop of missions would have helped this title sustain its energy beyond the initial burst.

Block Zombies! might not be the deepest experience out there, but it really serves its purpose as a short-lived, fast-paced shooter with a fun style. It creates a world that transported me back in time to my days as a kid playing with action figures and Legos, and it makes some basic, but intelligent design choices that make it easy to get hooked on and continue playing. While there are clearly some areas that could be improved upon, it’s pretty easy to recommend laying the dollar down for Block Zombies!.

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Block Zombies! was purchased for 80 MS points ($1). You can download a free demo on the Xbox Marketplace. 

By Mike Wall at January 23, 2012.

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.