You’ll practically cruise through the levels, focusing on the key objectives (kill all the people, teach the exit) and maybe going for the secondaries (hit the target time, get the cannibal lurking at the bottom). In the early stages it’s just one gleefully sadistic knockabout farce, where you’ll cheer your zombies on as they bash down doors, swamp the living and put the bite on.

Meanwhile, the clawed, climbing mutants will move faster and attack more aggressively when set to sprint. Turn a zombie into an overlord then apply the leap ability and he’ll cheerfully launch his fellow walkers towards the place you targeted. You can even use a syringe to infect isolated humans perfect for spreading the disease in places that your standard-issue dead can’t reach.Ĭleverly, you can also stack some mutations. Meanwhile, temporary mutations can be applied to make your zombies run faster, 28 Days Later-style, or leap into the air. Later on, you’ll get wall-crawling fiends with razor claws and huge monstrosities with a tank-like construction. Other zombies can be changed to pause briefly before exploding loudly, blowing up obstructions – including human ones – and spreading the infection. Some can become overlords, able to block oncoming zombies and turn them on their heals. Provided you have a supply of zombie DNA points, gained by biting the living, you can transform a zombie at the touch of a number key or icon. And that’s where your zombie mutations come in. Swarm them en masse and you can overwhelm them, but sometimes it takes something more. In fact, they’ll use handguns, shotguns and baseball bats to whittle down your numbers. High drops are fatal, mines can be a nightmare, while not all those pesky humans will take their grisly demise lying down. Even with its arcing blood splatters, foul-mouthed crims and flesh-eating ghouls, there’s something lovable about Zombie Night Terror’s low-res cartoon-video-nasty style.Īs in Lemmings, the zombies march relentlessly in one direction until they meet an obstacle, someone edible or something that results in their doom.

The visual style is classic 16-bit pixel art, with a restrained palette of greys and crimsons handy for a game of macabre slapstick, where a more realistic treatment might simply be too gruesome. Like Lemmings, it’s played from a 2D side-on perspective, with the level scrolling at a tap of the cursor keys and the view zooming in and out with the mouse wheel. Bitten humans then turn into zombies, inflating your stumbling, decomposing ranks. Sure, you want your shambling hordes to survive wherever possible, but often only so that they can grab and gorge themselves on every human that’s slow or unlucky enough to get within chomping range.

The difference is that where Lemmings is about preserving life, Zombie Night Terror is about the very opposite. Like Lemmings it’s a game of herding large numbers of dumb creatures to their goal, without the whole bunch meeting a gruesome end. Think of Zombie Night Terror as Lemmings meets Dead Rising, or maybe as the game that Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez might have made if they’d been obsessed by the Psygnosis classic.

Zombie night terror review board game