Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

Zombie Driver is not complicated. There are zombies. You are a driver. When your car hits zombies, they die. With these simple concepts and just a few embellishments, Zombie Driver provides some mindless fun before eventually growing slightly tedious.

The main story mode consists of seventeen missions (about 3 hours of play) loosely linked by a generic zombie story. Each mission consists of a primary objective of rescuing people before they get killed and various secondary missions such as beating a time limit, clearing an area of zombies, or killing a certain number of zombies. The missions are generally quite easy, though some secondary objectives, especially the zombie killing ones, can grow rather tedious.

Initially, you have a simple taxi to drive, but, as you progress, you earn other cars as well as weapons, both of which can be upgraded with money you earn for completing missions well. In principle, the variety is nice, but in practice, you'll find yourself using the same cars, most notably the bus, over and over because they have sufficient passenger space so as to not require that you make multiple trips for survivors. The weapons, which include machine guns, flame throwers, and more, are fun, but they don't become fully upgraded until near the end of story, at which point they reset.

The primary problem with these missions is repetition. There is almost no variety in terrain or objectives, and, as I mentioned, one or two cars are the best optimized. Couple that with only a loose framework of a story, and tedium sets in eventually, despite the fun beginning. Perhaps if the ability to leave your car, a la GTA, was added, some variety could be implemented. Better balancing of cars would also help, as would more creative objectives. Still, it ends quickly, so the tedium doesn't get too bad.

All of this is presented in a top down perspective of a 3D world. The graphics are fairly good, and a wide range of settings makes it playable on a wide range of machines. Remarkably, no minimap is included during gameplay, which was a horrible oversight. The sound work is fairly unremarkable, though some of the voices are quite bad. The controls are very tight and simple, making the game easily playable with either keyboard+mouse or a gamepad; I found the latter slightly more comfortable, though.

Aside from the main story, there are two other game modes. The first is Blood Race, which is a racing mode in which you compete against computer controlled opponents through zombie filled streets. The second is Slaughter Mode, in which you must hold off waves of attacking zombies to rack up high scores. Both modes feature online leader boards and Steam achievements. These additional types off play are fun for a little while, but again suffer from slowly increasing tedium.

Zombie Driver sells for $9.99 at the time of this writing. It's clearly a budget title, but it can provide some good, mindless, zombie-killing fun. It's competently implemented, so its only major drawback is its simplicity, which leads to repetition and tedium eventually. Ultimately, most players will only spend a few hours in the game, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at this price point. It's not a must have title, but if you're looking for something of this sort, it's not a bad purchase either.