That’s not necessarily a bad thing but this game does make it difficult for newcomers to dig into it. By the time I hit a level where numerous infection types were needed and the armed human population started shredding my humble horde of undead, I realized this was less of a zombie game and more of a puzzle game under a thin coating of zombie guts.
The only way to replenish this is by collecting barrels of toxic sludge, which are fairly scarce and tricky to get to in each level. Naturally you have a limited number of infections to use, dictated by a power meter at the bottom of the screen. I ended up using the exploding zombies quite a lot, as not only do they blast apart obstacles but they infect every nearby human and grow your horde even more. Mutations add new strategy to the puzzles, allowing you to turn one zombie into a conductor of sorts that directs the rest, give zombies the ability to leap over gaps, or inflate and explode. As the levels-and the humans-get more dangerous you can escalate by mutating zombies with powers that unlock the farther you progress. Levels become more complex with barricades, locked doors, fatal drops and weak floors that require a certain number of zombies to crumble. Of course, this is just basic strategy and the game’s difficulty ramps up quickly.
It’s better to infect in an area full of unarmed humans and grow a small horde, so that you can overwhelm any armed humans with numbers. It might seem tempting to infect a human standing next to a guy with a shotgun or a katana, hoping that your fresh zombie will take out the threat, but more than likely the armed human will get wise and waste his newly-undead buddie in short order. Early on you can be fairly random about it, but after a level or two the humans start arming themselves. You start each stage with a limited number of syringes with which to strategically infect various humans around the level.
This combination of genres seems brilliant on paper and initially it is, but the execution leaves something to be desired. The game consists of 40 levels where you must infect civilians, grow your horde of ghouls and then direct them through numerous obstacles in order to turn or kill a certain quantity of the humans in the level. Remember Lemmings? The quirky puzzle game made by DMA Design way back in the 90s, before they were Rockstar Games? Well imagine Lemmings but with zombies and you’ll have a pretty good picture of Zombie Night Terror. There are dozens of pixel-art zombie games cluttering up the Steam store right now, so what could one more possibly offer that the rest don’t? Well, gameplay genre for one, but it’s a stretch with a game like Zombie Night Terror, and your mileage may vary. For every game that looks like Enter the Gungeon or Mercenary Kings, there are ten samey NES rip-offs. Games with 8-bit pixel art have also been done to death, often under the pretense of being “retro” or “arty” but let’s be honest, it’s because 8-bit graphics are cheap and easy to do. We passed peak zombie a long, long time ago.
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