iAppLover

Zombies are a part of any movie-watching culture and now the iPhone gets some of the fun. Zombieville is a quick side-scrolling shoot’em up game for the iPhone for action fans who get itchy trigger fingers when they’re on break. As a never-ending side-scroller that involves zombies, it works. It delivers exactly what it promises – a village of zombies with you smack dab in the middle of it with an armory on your back. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The formula remains consistent – shoot some zombies, get some money and get a better gun to more efficiently decimate the undead with. You get stuff like the standard evil dead shotgun and of course, flamethrowers. As a soldier fighting the undead, you’ve gotta have a flamethrower. Zombies aren’t the only things inexplicably carrying cash. You can also do the logical thing and go into houses to loot the cash hiding within. Sometimes you find ammunition instead of cash, but never both, which can spell your doom if you were really looking for some ammo and instead you find some money and yourself defenseless as only in a capitalist society can you use money as a weapon.

Unlike many other zombie games, without ammo, you’re pretty much a goner in Zombieville and that’s the end of it. Only between stages do you actually get to buy new weapons. Houses in the game provide, in addition to the aforementioned bonuses and treats, offer a level of protection for the desperate.

Since it’s a side-scroller, controls remain basic and easy to understand. Two buttons to move left and right and you just tap around the bottom area of the screen to unleash the fury – or that’s the theory anyway, since its notoriously unresponsive at times. Another issue with the game is that you can’t just go to the main menu. You need to die or turn off the app and restart it to get to the main menu. It’s such a simple detail that most people would be annoyed that the programmers didn’t bother to put it in.

At around $2 on its price tag, a player would like to take out zombies at different locations. The graphics can becomes really tiring to look at real fast as you look at the same thing over and over again. It’s all the same, which makes you feel like you’re not getting anywhere no matter how many zombies you burn or gun down.

It’s a simple game and unfortunately, that’s as far as Zombieville gets. It doesn’t get more complicated or deeper – what you see in the start is pretty much what you’re going to get and that might not be worth $2 for a lot of people.