Atom Zombie Smasher is a real-time strategy game developed by independent developer Blendo Games. In it, the player attempts to rescue as many citizens as possible from an oncoming zombie horde using helicopter rescue units and an array of military units to protect the citizens and defeat the zombies.
This is a game released on 2011 and I’ve talked about it in my article 5 zombies games on Linux so why talking about it as news ?
Because it’s this week star at the Humble Weekly Sale
This means that potentially you can have this game for just 1$ instead of the standard 15$ from the official website or the 10$ from steam (that still don’t support the Linux version), so it’s for sure a good moment to buy this small and funny game if you missed it in the past.
Gameplay
The game is played in the map of a city seen from above, where zombies are represented as purple dots and fleeing survivors are yellow squares, later in the games you’ll also have scientists represented as blue dots, that will give special bonus if saved from the horde.
Both of these dots move around the city streets and between buildings on small maps presented from a top-down perspective. Your job is to position weapons at key locations around the map to hold back the encroaching zombie hordes while survivors flock to an escape helicopter to get lifted out of the zone.
There are many different unit that you can use in your missions such as military infantry, sniper, landmines or a cannon up to a nuke,certain military units can be re-positioned or reoriented in real time, as well as activating certain abilities such as mortar fire or zombie lures. The player must rescue a minimum number of civilians on each map to win that mission; failing to do so allows the player to retry that mission or forfeit to move onto the next mission.
Failure is often an inevitability. It’s about how far you can get, how much of the city you can save – or at least evacuate – before the horde gains an incontestable majority.
The game uses an unlock system to regulate the types of weapons made available in each level and depending on the number of kills made (or civilians saved for the helicopter) your units will gain experience points that you can use to buy new ability for them, so this allow you to customize your units as you like, perhaps you want a quick infantry that can move really fast, or you prefer snipers that don’t miss a shot ?
At the end of each map both you and the enemy side will gain points based on some factors such as the number of civilians/scientists saved, number of zombie killed and so on, these points will stack up to see who will win the war at the end: you or the zombies horde ?
The games are heavily randomised and there’s a good deal of variety in each game you play, at least in terms of how levels begin to pan out. However, things tend to follow the same pattern after the first few territories go down. It’s very rare that you are in anything remotely constituting a strong position because with territory you take back, another two or three fall under undead control, but you’ll be able to use some heavy bombs to take back (or at least reset) some territories.
And I did not say that the game has many campaigns with Mods done by other players and the ability to play in multiplayer.
Absolutely recommended for a few hours of fun without much thought.
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