*Advertising disclosure* - After this review was posted, Black Shell Media became an advertising partner.  This review is not influenced by this relationship.

Thank you Black Shell Media for sending us the review code.

Nowadays, when I see a game that includes zombies in the title I get a little skeptical. I’ve seen plenty of games that just throw some zombies in and expect everything to be good. I was really afraid this was going to be one of those games when I first got it. I will admit, I was really wrong. Zombie City Defense 2 is a game that I wound up really enjoying and is one that I wish I had more time to play.

Zombie City Defense 2 is like a mixture of tower defense and some smaller scale real-time strategy (RTS) with its gameplay. You get presented with different missions where you must survive for a certain number of days. Each mission has a different map which requires changes in tactics, but your same basic strategy remains the same. You will need to scavenge the surrounding buildings for resources in order to build up better defenses to survive the many attacks by the zombies. By completing missions, you are awarded points to spend to unlock extra things to use during the missions such as new units and abilities.

Each mission comes with some different difficulties that you can attempt for even more points, but that isn’t the only way to gain points. Each higher difficulty of missions also adds some extra secondary objectives to do that can be really challenging. It is by completing these that you will really start to get some extra points. These points are really important since each mission can’t be easily completed in the same way. You will want to get a variety of different things unlocked so you can take them on the missions. An amphibious vehicle isn’t very useful on most levels, but one that has a lot of water would really benefit from it. Likewise, a unit good at breaching buildings is almost always useful unless you are on a mission where you just need to hold out in the compound the whole time.

What I found the most interesting that this game did is how you search buildings. Any infantry unit can be sent into a structure to scavenge or kill an enemy if one is present. While inside a building, units have some boosts to their defenses and some, if tall enough, can even provide a range bonus. You will wind up using these structures a lot to create choke points to prevent the zombies from reaching your main base and destroying it. Depending on how you set up your forces for each mission will determine how you go about completing it. If you go heavy into infantry, you will be setting up a lot of them in buildings and turning it into a tower defense experience. If you go more motorized, you will be setting up turrets and running vehicles around for some hit and run tactics. The game also does a good job at setting up missions where they give you the resources to go more one way instead of another to incentivize you to change how you play the game.

During my time playing the game I have ran into a few bugs. Most of them had to do with some pathfinding not working properly. On the first mission there is a tower that my units have a hard time pathing to and it is one that I seem to always run into on that mission. There was also one where I was holding a building out on an island and the zombies seemed like they couldn’t path to me. That was helpful at the time since it was a hard to defend bonus objective, but the game kept sending zombies there to get me so their numbers kept increasing which had me worried that they would all come to get me at once. Controls were mostly okay, but it could be hard to select units at times when they were in a structure that could also be selected. The game did include a tutorial, but I did have to look up some help on one of the missions since there were some features that weren’t explained properly in the game. Once I figured that stuff out, the game did become much easier to play.

The music, while not being outstanding, wasn’t something I ever got tired of listening to. It was mostly background stuff so it isn’t really something that would normally stand out, but I think it serves its purpose well. Sound effects were pretty good. The guns weren’t the most realistic sounding, but they did serve their purpose and there was some work done to make the different weapons sound different so you could tell who was firing just by the sound. Art is one thing that stood out to me the most about this game. Everything is fairly simplistic, but is looks very pretty. It looks a bit like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie where they are looking at a map on a hologram. The buildings are just some solid, slightly transparent colors, but they still manage to show off a lot of detail. The terrain is all black, but you can see the differences in it really well. Units, both yours and the enemy’s, are just icons on the map. This wasn’t something I liked too much at first, but it is something that really grew on me as I played. All of that, combined with the way the UI is designed, really gives off a feel that you are a commander back at base watching everything through a satellite.

Morally, there isn’t much in this game to talk about. There is violence with you killing zombies, but you are somewhat removed from what is happening so it doesn’t feel like much actually happened. You just have some icons removed from the map. Now, you can kill civilians by blowing up some buildings, but unless you check before doing it, you don’t really know if there are civilians in the structures. The only time you see story is when you read the brief descriptions of the missions and from the ones I have done I don’t remember any language. You will also be fighting zombies which some might not like. What I might say would prevent me the most from getting this for a younger player would be the difficulty of the game and the amount of trial and error required to progress. That could be a bit frustrating to a younger player.

Zombie City Defense 2 is a game that I wound up really enjoying. The game isn’t without faults, but it was one that I had enough fun playing to overlook them. It also isn’t too expensive. Back when I first started playing it, it was on sale for less than two dollars which, while being worth the regular ten dollar asking price, is totally worth that sweet sale price. It is a game that I’d like to play more of, and was one that I planned to fully beat before reviewing, but each mission does just take time since you must survive for a set amount of waves. That, in a way, is also a good thing since you will get a lot of gameplay time out of this if you do wind up getting it. I'm around 6 missions into it and I've already played for fifteen hours and I know that there are many more missions still left to do.

-Paul Barnard (Betuor)