Culture

Platforms: PC, OSX, LINUX. (4/5).

You can't help it; the gut reaction to guts being forcibly removed by a stumbling horde of on-screen undead will always be “what would I do in this situation?” Atom Zombie Smasher lets you answer that question, not as an individual deciding between the supermarket or the hardware store, but as a suit-wearing bureaucrat in city hall selecting who lives, and who doesn't, on a needs-of-the-many basis. Sometimes you have to use an insignificant group as zombie-nip so a larger one can safely get to the chopper without being infected. Sometimes you just have to.
 
The population of Neuvos Aires, represented by groups of yellow squares, seem to be even less cognisant than the characters from REC (seriously, you give up at the point when you effectively have Dumbledore-level invisibility?). A single violet square among their creamy yellow ranks will zombify a large group in a horrifying split second. I'd be irritated by a crowd's inability to dispatch a single walking corpse if it didn't keep the game balanced mechanically and make it feel appropriately frantic. Each two-minute territory you evacuate really feels like a quarantined zone of a virulent virus.
 

I did say “evacuate” by the way. Assessing the three words in the game’s title: the first is redundant (because everything is made of atoms, except for things like irony and electrons), the second is accurate and the third is misleading. Atom Zombie Smasher is, unexpectedly, not about empowering you to stomp, guilt-free, upon hordes of enemies. It's about disempowering you, in the sense that you will only ever kill a fraction of the total zombies, who will immediately be replaced ten-fold in a torrent, the undead will almost always infect the majority of the population and you only ever escape by the skin of your chattering teeth, forcing your helicopter to leave while there are still lonesome looking yellow bricks in the fray.
 

You're never completely helpless of course and the game's RPG and strategy mechanics give you plenty of room to exercise your delicious brain. Each territory you take over gives you new mercenaries with abilities that range from attracting zombies, to sniping from high-rises, to taking to the ghettos with gas masks and assault rifles. You can also rescue scientists who can be used to research new technologies in the war on flesh-eating souls of the damned. As you use said mercenaries and tech, you gain experience points allowing you to upgrade. On the next level outside the main gameplay is a Risk-style territory control and you gain victory points depending on which districts you control.
 

The game is not perfect. You might have to wrestle with the tutorial for a while and restart your game a few times before you get a good run, and you can always ask for more depth with these sorts of games (I want to able to shut down bridges, choose where to quarantine, drop supplies etc.) but Atom Zombie Smasher is an addictive and stylish effort from BLENDO Games. Download it; you can never have too many pieces of zombie-flavoured media.