The Endless Zombie Rampage

The Endless Zombie Rampage is the first game that I've reviewed here that's in a genre which is quite popular on Kongregate. I don't know if that genre has an official name, so I'll call it "survival shooter". There are several minor variations on the theme, but they're all basically the same -- an endless stream of enemies comes at you, and you have to shoot them by clicking on them. Sometimes you have a movable character, and sometimes you have a fixed turret; sometimes the perspective is top-down and sometimes it's a side view; and sometimes you have to defend your base, while sometimes all you have to defend is yourself. By shooting enemies, you gain points, which you can use to upgrade the terrible pistol that you start with (and it's always, and I mean always, a pistol) to a dizzying array of increasingly powerful weaponry, usually based on real weapons and often rendered to a lovingly precise degree, and yet somehow differing only in their damage, rate of fire, ammo capacity, and reload time.

Anyway, The Endless Zombie Rampage exhibits all of the characteristics of your typical survival shooter; it's a top-down shooter where you can move around, but have to defend your base as well as yourself. And, just to make it even more unbelievably generic, your enemies are the incredibly-popular zombies. (There are also zombified...well, things; they're not human, but it's not at all clear what they are.)

I tend to not be a huge fan of this genre (or maybe it's just that all of the games in this genre are so similar); it's really just mindless clicking, and there's not that much strategy or even all that much in the way of reflexes involved, and the fact that everything in The Endless Zombie Rampage is so plain vanilla -- there's absolutely nothing which innovates on the basic formula -- means that there's really not much to make you say, "Oh yeah, I really want to play this game!"

The graphics are pretty average. Like most games of this genre, it doesn't skimp on the blood, so pretty soon most of the ground is going to be red. There's not any music, just moaning and the sounds of your trusty weapon, which I guess is supposed to make the game feel more atmospheric. Anyway, like most of the rest of the game, the presentation is pretty average.

All in all, this ended up being a very generic experience. I went through it to get the badge, but found nothing interesting in it to make the experience at all memorable.