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Zombies & Me

EA attacks the 59p App Store market.

You can arrest this decline by circling back to the house at regular intervals, whereupon any swarming zombies immediately divert their attention to you, and give chase. And so you circle the house, car, occasional tree or boulder, trying to coordinate your path-finding to drag as many zombies onto targets as possible. At some stage something gives, and it's Game Over, at which point you're shown a breakdown of your score - zombies killed, time played, and so on.

You're no doubt hoping, as I was, to discover that this score is then uploaded to some sort of online clearinghouse for zombie slaughter - for integration with social networks, at the very least. But integration there is none. Perhaps some other levels, then? Nope, nothing. The above is entirely it. It's hard to imagine that a few different level layouts, or traps, or other extras would have added a great deal of development time to the deliberately short cycle, but there you go. The only way the game reaches beyond the borders of grandma's plot is to access an online coverflow shopfront for EA's other iPhone games.

There are tap and hold control alternatives, and your vision isn't terribly obscured by your finger's constant presence.

As for what's here, it's diverting enough for 10 minutes, but those hoping for a kind of Geometry Wars 2 Pacifism or King pretender will be disappointed, as the finger-dragging control system, swarming AI and split health systems don't come across that way. You dodge for a bit, and then come unstuck, but there's little in the way of nuance, or variation in pace, and in the absence of anything else to aim for there's nothing to draw you back in once you come unstuck.

In other words, no, 8lb Gorilla's first game doesn't suggest EA has learned its way around the App Store yet. 59p is a tiny amount of money to spend on a game, but expectations are higher than this, thanks to games like DrawRace from RedLynx, which aims for the same one-more-go segment but also includes multiple stages and national and global online leaderboards. The bigger shame though is that there's a good bit of potential in Zombies & Me, and the 8lb Gorilla concept. If it's to work in the long term, however, EA will need to pay more attention to what successful App Store companies are doing - ngmoco's Plus+ system and customer loyalty built through quality freebies - rather than obsessing over the 59p price.

4 / 10