Thanks to Awesome Games Studio for the Steam key for review!

Yet Another Zombie Defense is a twin-stick shooter arcade game that attempts to implement tower defense mechanics. This review will cover the free classic version of the game since that’s the version we got a code for.

The tower defense mechanics could work on paper. There’s a decent variety of barricades, traps, and guns to fight against the endless hordes of zombies. Guns can be your basic pistols or assault rifles to futuristic weaponry like lasers and tesla coils. Barricade and trap variety is plenty but ultimately most of these ended up feeling useless. What I assume to be the selling point of the game, tower defense mechanics in a twin-stick shooter, falls flat for several reasons. Basic barricades don’t offer much help since they don’t damage enemies. Staying in one spot is a bad idea and will get you killed. The only defense feature that I found viable was an expensive turret that you could mount a gun on top of. Everything in the shop was expensive enough to prevent creating elaborate defensive structures. I ended up surviving for longer by ignoring the defensive upgrades and focusing on purchasing ammo and guns in between rounds.

What’s left when you ignore the defense mechanics? A standard and boring arcade game. Running in large circles strafing around the zombies is the most viable yet incredibly boring strategy. It doesn’t help that the UI is sort of wonky and that nothing really has any ‘oomph’ to it. Zombies act largely unphased to bullets, and just sorta plop onto the ground when dying. The same annoying song plays on repeat and sounds are serviceable but forgettable. The artwork is all done in these dark boring colors that’re borderline ugly. In fact, the whole game is forgettable.

The only redeeming factor I can think of is the online multi-player. It works perfectly with zero latency problems or bugs. There are 3 different modes to play, and I found the deathmatch mode where you fight your friends amidst the zombie horde to be more fun than the core defense mode. When I played there were exactly 3 people in-game including a friend that was with me, so community seems to either be nonexistent or possibly transfered over to the HD version. I can see the game being fun to goof off in on a late Friday night, but in the long term there are much better games to play.

Zombies are constantly slaughtered, and with their deaths comes plenty of blood. The small square arena you play in becomes a bloody mess fairly quickly. The game is violent but doesn’t cross the line with language or other issues.

Yet Another Zombie Defense funnily enough lives up to its name. It’s just another boring zombie game whose core mechanics end up being useless for success. I’m not sure why you would want an HD version either, but if you fall in love with this free version, it might be worth getting the upgrades.