Atom Zombie Smasher - One Shot

Go To The Winchester, Have A Nice Cold Pint And Wait For This All To Blow Over

I really didn't Atom Zombie Smasher to be a One Shot, but then, I never played it a short campaign on it before. The games I had played of it before were brutally difficult, making me quit out, saying "I must have fucked up big time somewhere!" Turns out, my fuck up was playing a normal length game!

Typical Friday night! Am I right?

I really like Blendo Games, the team behind Atom Zombie Smasher. They seem like a group that get absurd humour, as shown in this and their previous game Flotilla, where you play a spaceship pilot in a galaxy filled with evil space deer and Rastafarian cats. AZS continues this fine trend by setting a zombie apocalypse in...Nuevos Aires? Yeah, I had to look up if it's a real place too. The game is filled with little vignettes of different characters, such as my personal favourite: "Animal" Smith, who makes a right dick of himself in most of them.

Poor Animal

However, Flotilla was so rich with story that the small, bite-sized chunks that were occasionally dished out throughout my campaign didn't satisfy me. This could have been a problem with playing a Short campaign, but a problem that could have been easily solved by giving them more frequently. However, the ones that I did see where still funny and provided some personal story to a largely anonymous game.

Gameplay-wise, Atom Zombie Smasher hits a lot of high notes with it's overhead, real-time strategy action. It's easy to spend countless minutes trying to plan how to rescue all the civilians from the Zed, calculating where they are gonna go and where to place snipers, foot soldiers or explosives, only to have it all go to shit when you accidentally blow up about twenty civilians with dynamite...in my defense, I didn't know that they couldn't be detonated individually.

It's got a better love story than Aquaria, that's for sure

However, it's these mishaps during a mission that add to the charm, because it makes you think on feet. I blew up some civilians, so I knew it wasn't worth my trouble sending soldiers or my rescue helicopter over there and could focus my efforts elsewhere on the map, probably resulting in me doing much better in the mission than I would have otherwise. I've never been a huge fan of real-time strategy, but I feel Atom Zombie Smasher gets it right by giving you access to map control, rather than units. It gives the game a kind of reverse-tower defense style to it, and I thorughly enjoyed it.

I imagine I'll go back to Atom Zombie Smasher in the future, and play a longer game, because I do love the quirky humour and engaging gameplay, and Blendo Games isn't known to disappoint, with their "20th Century Cyberpunk" hacker game Quadrilateral Cowboy on the horizon, I look forward to see how the company make light of another silly situation.

How's that for a slice of fried gold?

Next up...Bastion!