Zombieville USA 2 Review

You know what I’ve been craving lately? Zombie games. We haven’t had enough of them, honestly. There is demand for them, and the market isn’t providing! Anyway, sarcasm aside, I think zombie games and World War II games are tied for the most saturated subject matter in video games. Regardless of that, entertaining zombie games can still exist; they just have to bring something new to the table. With the main objective in all of these games being exactly the same, that’s a challenging thing to do, but Zombieville USA 2 tries. Does it succeed, though?

Mika Mobile brings us Zombieville USA 2, the sequel to their previous Android action game about destroying soggy corpses. The game consists of levels in which you kill as many zombies as you can within the time limit. To move on to the next area, you must first kill a certain amount of zombies. Because of this, repeating some of the earlier levels will become necessary in order to advance. Normally, I’d say that this makes things repetitive, but that would be a redundant criticism for a zombie game.

Despite my negative tone so far, the actual gameplay of Zombieville USA 2 is actually quite solid. You choose from a selection of silly characters (monocled gentlemen, panda, etc.) and a huge arsenal of firearms (shotgun, Tesla cannon, etc.) in order to commit mass re-murder. Similar to arcade beat-em-ups, you move along a 2D plane, but can move up and down the street. Your character only faces left and right, so it’s frustrating when there’s a zombie right above you because you can’t just run upwards. You need to make two diagonal turns to kill them as they eat away at your health. I guess it’s your fault if you let them get that close to begin with, but I still see it as a design flaw.

The weapons are fun to use, and they’re pretty varied, so you’ll likely find a favorite. I was partial to the assault rifle/chainsaw/mine combo. Aside from the aforementioned Tesla cannon, there’s not much new here, as most of these weapons are already present in other zombie games. There is actually one weapon that is extremely rare for a zombie game to contain, though. If you see a car, you can jump into it and start a hit-and-run session. You unleash your road rage for a few seconds while mowing down any and all zombies in your path. I can’t remember the last time I did that in a zombie game. And at the end of each level, you jump onto the ladder of a helicopter and fly away, Broforce-style. Zombieville USA 2 has some cool moments like this, but it’s mostly just standard stuff.

Though not groundbreaking, the graphics are nice and clean. Very colorful, too. However, since the style is so simplistic, most of the zombies look like green versions of the ones from Plants vs. Zombies, so that’s another unfortunate way in which this game lacks originality. Just like in that game, the juxtaposition of these cartoony characters and the tons of zombie guts everywhere is oddly charming. It would be nice to have a larger variety of zombie types, though.

As you can tell from all the namedrops, Zombieville USA 2 is extremely derivative. That’s not really its fault since I strongly believe that the zombie genre has been done to death at this point. I mean, that’s not stopping Konami from making Metal Gear Survive, but what can ya do? At the end of the day, it’s a solid, but painfully average game. If this came out years ago, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat, but genre fatigue has already set in, so I’d recommend checking out any of the other 400 zombie games out there for something better.