Dawn Of The Dead – iPhone – Review
Dawn of the Dead is a new iPhone game from Bytemark Games, taking place in the 2004 remake’s Crossroads Mall. You play as either a policeman, a lady nurse or a salesman. I chose to play as the salesman as he looks like Shaun, especially from the top down view (no cricket bats though). Each character has their own attributes but these don’t really make a huge amount of difference to the game.
It’s fundamentally a twin stick shooter but adds in close combat weapons for a bit of variety. Move with your left thumb and attack with your right by tapping the screen.
Controls take a little bit of getting used to as you don’t aim where you’re facing. Unlike other shooters that I’ve played on the iPhone, Dawn of the Dead uses a 360 degree second stick as well, meaning that you can move in any direction while swinging or shooting in another. This is actually a necessity as you’ll usually be backing up hitting the zombies that are chasing after you.
Missions take the form of find an item, get to a location, survival, eradicate all zombies or any combination of those. There is only 5 levels though and you’ll blast through it in about half an hour. The harder difficulty setting is marginally tougher but it won’t take you much longer than that.
Each level you complete earns you a new melee and gun weapon but I completed the game twice without even firing a gun. While the weapons all also have their own attributes these can all pretty much be ignored apart from speed, with the difference between each level of power and range almost negligible.
Graphically it’s pleasing enough, with the zombies leaving a decent blood trail, but overall they’re more functional than special and while the character models may be in 3D you don’t really notice and some of the animations when the zombies run at you are comical as their over-sized legs drag out behind them.
Although the main game won’t take long there are also a number of challenges for you to complete in the form of condensed versions of the levels. Again these are pretty simple even on the hard difficulty setting but at least offers a reason to keep coming back.
Overall it’s not bad for £1.19/$1.99 but it’s far from great and seems to just be a way of getting you to buy the movie which is plasters all over the title screen. You’d be better off with the much more fun Alive 4 Ever.
Dawn of the Dead is available on the iPhone now.
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