Zombo Buster Rising

Developer: FIREBEAST | Publisher: FIREBEAST | Release Date: 2016 | Genre: Action / Casual / Indie | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

Zombo Buster Rising is set in the city of Medan, which is in the middle of a zombie apocalypse thanks to a mysterious villain who infected the population with the disease. Clearly this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened as the city has its own trained team of anti-zombie forces. They are called Zombo Buster and their sole duty is protecting Medan City from the zombies. Unfortunately, you are not part of this elite group, but instead you play as an ordinary survivor waiting for them to rescue you. Thankfully, you do have a gun and a base at your disposal, so you might as well kill some zombies to pass the time until help arrives.

Your only goal in ZBR is to dispose of the shambling horde of zombies that are making a beeline for your base. Your character is situated on the roof of the base, but there is nothing preventing the zombies from getting to you apart from your trusty gun. Initially, you only have yourself to rely on and a rather puny gun, but killing zombies is apparently a profitable endeavor as you will quickly be able to upgrade your weapon. You are not the only survivor weathering out the zombie onslaught either, as two other people will eventually join your group. Although you don’t have direct control over these two AI characters, they will help you to shoot zombies and you are able to upgrade their stats along with your own.

The best way to sum up Zombo Buster Rising is “mindless entertainment.” Killing the zombies doesn’t require much more effort than holding down the fire button and moving your cursor over the incoming zombies. Every now and then some refugees will make a run for your base and you’ll want to avoid shooting them as they will reward you with gold if they make it to safety. Everyone else is fair game, though, so you definitely don’t want any of the zombies to get within reach of your base. Eventually you’ll find that guns alone won’t cut it when it comes to fending off the undead, which is where your super abilities comes in handy. The first is the ability to throw dynamite anywhere on the level, the second stops zombies in their tracks for a short time and the last rains down nukes out of the sky. You have to be careful with the timing of these abilities, though, as they take a while to recharge and you don’t want to end up in a situation where you really need them, but can’t activate them yet. You can buy an item from the in-game shop to instantly recharge your abilities, but upgrading your weapons is a better use for your hard earned coins.

In addition to increasing the base damage of your gun, you can also improve its rate of fire, reload speed, bullet capacity and even special ability if you have enough coins. It might be tempting to lavish all the upgrades on your main character, as he is the only one that you can control directly, but making your allies more powerful can help a lot. One of them wields a sniper rifle that can shoot through multiple enemies if you upgrade it and the other shoots up to three rockets after a few upgrades.

The main character wields a SMG, with bullets that can stun enemies if you upgrade it. In addition to earning cash from completing levels and saving refugees, you can also earn up to three diamonds per level, depending on how well you do. These diamonds are very useful as they allow you to upgrade things like your critical hit chance, the speed and resilience of refugees, as well as the explosion damage of your nukes, among other things.

Visually, ZBR looks like a free Flash game, which is how it was originally released online. However, the developers didn’t just slap a price tag on it when they released it on Steam, but did actually make a couple of improvements. The game now has 29 normal levels, a boss level, as well as a survival mode that wasn’t present in the Flash version. The character upgrades have also been extended and the visual quality got a bit of a boost. In addition, the game sports all the usual Steam features, such as Trading Cards, Achievements, and Steam Cloud support. Considering how cheap the game is on Steam, it is definitely worth the asking price when looking at all the improvements over the free version. The only downside to the visuals is the fact that the game only features a single background for all of the levels. Thankfully, the zombie designs are a bit more imaginative, even if a few of them look like they shambled over from Plants Versus Zombies. You have ordinary zomboys and zomgirls, as well as zombies floating from bullet proof balloons, Big Lud zombies that can black damage to all the zombies behind them, and ultra hipster zombies that can heal other zombies. There’s even nightcrawler zombies that can neutralize special effects and Shadow Book zombies that can turn invisible.

The audio for the game isn’t bad, but none of the tunes are really memorable. At least nothing is annoying either, although levels are short enough that this isn’t much of an issue in any case. Likewise, the sound effects are decent, but unremarkable. The game is controlled via your mouse and keyboard, with left click taking care of shooting and the Q,W,E, and R keys used for triggering abilities or reloading. You can also manually click on the icons to trigger abilities, but using keyboard hot-keys is simply more convenient. The game doesn’t offer much when it comes to options, though, as you can only adjust the level of the background music and the sound effects.

Overall, we didn’t really expect much from Zombo Buster Rising, considering the basic 2D visuals and bargain bin price tag, but ended up enjoying it enough to unlock every single achievement. It’s not a very hard game, especially compared to other similar titles, but it does offer plenty of mindless entertainment. Levels are fairly short and it doesn’t take very long to fully upgrade everything. If you haven’t completed the game by the time that this happens, you can use your excess cash to buy items like medical kits to recover health during levels, maintenance kits to refresh the cooldown of you abilities, and even an “iron machine” to kill all land zombies on the screen. If you do happen to fail a level, it even allows you to restart while keeping all the gold that you have earned. At the end of the day, this game is cheap enough to warrant a purchase if you have any interest in the genre and want something that can be completed quickly and easily. You’ll probably forget it as soon as it is over, but it is definitely fun while it lasts.