THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

The Zombie apocalypse has come to the old West; the land of Cowboys, gold miners and posse. A crew of desperados will need to take a stand and, using your strategic wit, you can lead those band of do-gooders to victory in this turn-based strategy game. You must scavenge what you can and use the talents of individual team members to stay alive, unravelling the Zombie mystery as you travel these dusty, savage lands.

MY VERDICT:

Gunslingers & Zombies is a perfectly enjoyable, light-hearted, and light-weight, turn-based strategy game that pits Cowboys against Zombies. It's that uniqueness of concept that is the main draw of the game - there really are not that many turn-based strategy games involving Zombies out there and none set in the wild west. Aside from that though, you'll immediately notice the cartoony, block-like, low-detail aesthetics which you are either going to love or hate - I enjoy them, again as a departure from the usual gorefests of living dead games these days. However, if the term 'turn-based strategy' immediately makes you think of XCOM with Zombies, you are way off the mark. This game is just a collection of scenarios that pit a squad of up to four Cowboys (or Cowgirls) against unending groups of Zombies. There is no chance to customise "soldiers", no research, no single band of warriors throughout the entire game that you "level up", unlocking new skills and, to me, that is a bit of a missed opportunity - perhaps understandable for an indie game but it is hard to care about characters getting swarmed by ghouls if they are just nameless figures. A second big negative is just how easy and short the game is - it is very straightforward to complete most of the scenarios without ever losing a man; keep your guys moving slowly, in tight formation and you cannot really go wrong. I would have loved some dynamic events or randomness to keep you on your toes, adapting to new threats in this new, hostile world. There are bonus objectives for each scenario to try to eek out as much gameplay as possible though these are still quite easy and, for the most part, utterly pointless. The final bad point that I'm going to raise is the user interface (UI) and overly convoluted ammunition system. The UI is just so clunky and all over the place, often being just confusing. Tile selection is a particularly awful example as, far too often have I sent a character running to a tile by mistake, not realising I already had another character selected. And don't even get me started on the complexities of the ammo and reloading gubbins - it's a nice idea and can lead to situations where characters completely run out of bullets, having to dispatch Zombies with their (way over-powered) knife but is far more confusing than it needs to be.