For those of you unequipped with a Spanish tongue, ‘Animales de la Muerte’ translates to ‘Animals of Death’, so you can safely assume that this game is about zombie animals. Zoombies: Animales de la Muerte (out now, $2.99) pits players in a zoo in Little Mexico where all the animals have come down with a serious case of ‘Undeath’. The only hope of keeping these Zoombies (get it?) from infecting the rest of the zoo animals are Marco and Maria, a pair of school kids who find themselves on the most twisted field trip ever.
Before you dive into the zombie killing action, you must choose who to play as – Marco or Maria. Being a guy, I chose Marco, but I don’t think it really matters (although the costume options for each character probably vary).
Henceforth, each level is set out like this: Marco (or Maria) is on the far left side of the screen waiting for the zombies to approach. Sometimes non-zombie animals will walk towards them, which you must protect from the undead animals. To kill them, you draw a path that you would like the character to throw their weapon along. So if you want to kill multiple zombies in a line, simply draw a path from the character through all the zombies and let go. It’s definitely a unique method to kill zombies, by throwing an axe through multiple bodies, but it’s definitely as awesome as it sounds.
Zoombies comes with more than regular upgrades. Each time you kill a zombie, a coin pops out of them. If you kill multiple zombies in one path, several coins will fall everywhere. You must frantically tap each coin to collect them, making things on screen extremely hectic, especially in later levels. These coins can be exchanged for multiple weapon upgrades, powers, or costumes to dress up your pretty character.
The depth comes in when you pass the first 10 or so levels. Different zombie animals begin to attack you, such as elephants and snails. These require different weapons to pierce through their armor, which you can pick up at the gift shop. The upgrades are reasonably priced, but for those less patient, there are of course in-app purchases available to buy more coins.
iFanzine Verdict: Everything about Zoombies jumps out as being fun. The cartoony graphics, the bloody effects every time you kill a zombie, the frantic mania of animal zombies flooding your screen – it’s all extremely fun. There’s only one problem – the difficulty. I skip through each level fairly easily on my first go (I haven’t lost once), so it’s not much of a challenge after a few levels. That’s not to say I deleted it, I still launch it every now and then just to earn some extra coins and test out the other myriad of upgrades available.