The best way of describing Zombotron would be to call it a strategic run-and-gun game vaguely reminiscent of what it’d look like if Contra had been developed as a tactical shooter. Some regular enemies are so absurdly powerful that they can kill you in a single hit, and even those that aren’t can do damage that you’re not always in a position to heal, so creeping along and using your weaponry and the physics of the environment to dispatch them one at a time can be incredibly rewarding. That’s assuming that those same environmental physics don’t lead to you killing yourself first, of course, and that’s where we get to the caveat—there are many, many ways that you can die in Zombotron, and not all of them are fair. In fact, merely listing all of the negative experiences that I had with unexpected deaths will undoubtedly cause this review to come across as harshly negative, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is actually remarkably solid when everything is working as expected, and the underlying brilliance of the gameplay systems and their numerous tactical possibilities shines through even when it isn’t. With some rebalancing, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes, Zombotron could be quite the special game. In its current state, however, it’s possible to die from enemies and explosives that are inexplicably hidden in the shadows, and that’s the kind of thing most players aren’t going to enjoy fighting through.

Zombotron‘s story isn’t the focus, but its characters are likable enough

The story begins with main character Blaze Rush arriving on an alien planet to investigate a distress signal, and he’s joined by his ship AI, Ash. Long story short, the mission goes south and the two end up stranded on the planet after various ship components are stolen. With no choice but to hunt down the thieves, the two set out and stumble across several different biological and mechanical races, each with their own boss-related issues that they have no choice but to help with in pursuit of their goal. The story, then, exists primarily as a justification for the gameplay, and it shows; various characters inundate you with lore the second you meet them, but you’re not expected to remember any of it so much as it’s there to overwhelm Blaze until he reluctantly agrees to help out. At one point, a character gives you an item that supposedly explains thousands of years of the planet’s history, only for Ash to conclude later that it’s written in an alien language that it lacks the components to read. The lore here is mostly surface-level, so the solution to every problem is to shoot it in the face until it stops being a problem. It’s an action movie plot, basically.

Honestly, I don’t have a problem with the limitations of the lore or storytelling in Zombotron. It’s the way the story ends on a cliffhanger before any of the overarching plot stuff has been resolved that gets under my skin; games that focus primarily on their stories can get away with cliffhangers because there’s a certain level of investment there, but it feels unearned in a game like Zombotron that focuses on its gameplay above all else. You succeed at one minor goal (which is quickly rendered insignificant), but will likely be left with even more questions.

Still, I found myself liking the characters overall. Blaze Rush’s personality has “weary action hero” written all over it, and the interplay between him and the occasionally sarcastic, very matter-of-fact Ash adds a splash of personality to the exploration. Minor characters are slotted in and out of the story as you progress, but mostly so that Blaze and Ash can find themselves roped into conflicts that they don’t entirely appreciate and/or understand. Zombotron begins much the same way as Super Metroid, with your playable character landing in a clearing on an unfamiliar planet, but having little bursts of conversation around every corner helps to keep the journey from feeling like a lonely one, and that grounds the game in a kind of lightheartedness that makes it easy to forgive some of its more baffling design decisions (in hindsight, at least—in the heat of the moment you’ll be screaming bloody murder).

The gameplay incorporates numerous elements into a cohesive whole

My initial impression was that Zombotron felt like a combination of Blackthorne and Metal Slug, and I stand by that comparison. The omnipresent physics are vaguely reminiscent of puzzle games like Contraption Maker, too, while the leveling system imparts a light RPG feel to the underlying gameplay. You level up by gathering blue orbs that drop from defeated enemies, at which point you can put points into your three stats: strength, dexterity, and vitality. These impact your melee damage, critical hit chance/damage, and health, and the various bits of equipment that you find can provide further boosts. The downside is that these only enable you to keep up with enemies rather than feeling like you’re becoming significantly more powerful; the only time I felt like these level-ups had an effect was when I found an absurdly powerful Fire Axe in a hidden area and was suddenly able to one-shot certain types of enemies thanks to putting so many points into strength. Having the ability to run into a room wildly swinging an axe instead of slowly picking off enemies was a big change, though new enemies were soon introduced to ensure it didn’t last.

There are only a few ways of healing in Zombotron. Experience orbs provide mild healing, while leveling up restores your health to full, but for the most part you’ll be relying on healing items to restore your health. These healing items are rare, especially early on, and they heal you over time rather than immediately, so you can’t afford to tank a bunch of hits; even if you could survive it, you’d quickly exhaust your healing supplies and have none left for an emergency. Enemy attacks are also very difficult to dodge thanks to their large hitboxes and enemies’ ability to turn around instantly for a followup attack when you jump over them, so a melee approach is only viable against foes who can be beaten in a single blow.

For the most part, you’ll be relying on the various guns that you find and purchase from vending machines, and the gunplay is where Zombotron is at its best. Different guns use different ammo types (so a pistol will use different ammo than a battle rifle or energy weapon), do different damage, have different firing rates, and have varying levels of accuracy. That last one is where things get interesting; there’s a slight inaccuracy to where shots land that’s reminiscent of the original Deus Ex, and bullets are the best way of dispatching enemies and interacting with the environment. You may intend to shoot a rope holding up a platform to crush an enemy, but the bullet has a chance of instead hitting and destroying the platform that another enemy is standing on, changing the battle situation by dropping them down to where they can pursue you together. Once you add in explosive containers and locational damage (shooting enemies in the head is always the fastest way to take them down), things can get pretty complex and chaotic. Your movement speed is slow enough that you can’t outrun enemies, either, so you’re often making split-second decisions.

Hunting for the loot-filled secret passages hidden in Zombotron‘s shadows

When you’re not gunning down rooms full of enemies, you’re engaging in platforming—sometimes being asked to use a moving physics object dangling from a rope as a stepping stone—and solving some light puzzles. There’s one full-blown puzzle that has you operating switches in order to move platforms up and down to use later as platforms, but otherwise the puzzles are of the “find a keycard to open this door” variety, and that’s where the other fun thing about Zombotron comes in: there are tons of secret passages hidden throughout levels. These are largely blocked off by destructible rocks, so moving up against dead ends and attacking the walls frequently allows you to break through and find a cache of money, ammo, and armor/weapons. It feels like you’re always discovering something new, and even when you aren’t, increasing your ammo supplies gives you a nice safety net that reduces the chance that you’ll be stuck with nothing but a melee weapon. That’s especially nice because your inventory space is limited; each ammo type takes up a space (as do keycards, though they’re used up once you find the door they belong to), so you’re often forced to sell weapons and ammo types to make room for something potentially better. I didn’t care for this at first, but it definitely adds tension that wouldn’t be present otherwise while providing you with money that helps balance out vending machine prices.

Bosses, balance issues, weird decisions, and bugs undermine the gameplay

Speaking of vending machines, it’s odd that the only information available to you before blowing most of your money on a new gun is a name, description (which is flavor text), and price. That means that you’re making your decision without knowing the ammo type it uses, how much damage its shots inflict, how fast it fires, or its accuracy. That’s a strange decision. Another strange decision is the way you can’t cancel a reload to equip a different weapon. If a bunch of enemies come from behind you—and they frequently spawn behind you at predetermined points, which is itself an odd choice—and you’re reloading, you have to dance around while avoiding their hits until you’re finished reloading. Zombotron also has a strange save system that saves your current state when entering a new room, but doors are one-way journeys. If you enter a boss fight room with low HP after having just used a healing item, you can expect to stand around for 20-30 seconds waiting for Blaze’s health to max out every time you fail. There’s also a single instant-death pit that I fell into, which is a questionable inclusion in a game that frequently asks you to leap blindly into pits that lead somewhere. You have no way of knowing this pit is different. You drop your equipped weapon (as well as some equipment) when you die, too, so dying here or in a pit of spikes can mean being unable to retrieve whatever weapon you had equipped.

I’m also not a huge fan of the gun-wielding enemies at the end. While they’re appropriately challenging for that point in the game, Zombotron has a tendency to hide them in hidden pathways, leading to moments where you lose significant chunks of health after taking a surprise shotgun to the face. Not all odd decisions are negative, however; while dying shortly after entering an area forces you to restart from the entrance, there are usually checkpoints that can be found, and interacting with these gives you a place to respawn. You can respawn a handful of times before getting a game over, so checkpoints effectively grant you extra lives. This can come in handy since the mid-game’s yellow robot enemies can kill you in a single ranged attack. I don’t know why they’re so strong.

The same goes for bosses, though the last two of them are actually surprisingly easy. It almost seems like the order is backwards, with the final couple of bosses being the easiest, while the first two are easily among the hardest. All bosses are major damage sponges, requiring something like a full minute of machine gun fire to the face to defeat, and several of them can kill you in 2-3 attacks. They also have an annoying habit of spawning helper enemies, and that can be rage-inducing in one fight where the boss can regenerate its health if you stop shooting at it. The only bosses I fought 100% legitimately were the first and last ones—every other fight came down to me abusing Zombotron‘s mechanics to prevail. For example, the spider boss is a huge difficulty spike, but you can lure it to the side of the room and then jump on top of its claw and shoot it from above while remaining out of range. The two bosses after that begin with you entering the room from a high point, and you can simply stay up there and snipe them to death. The one fight that I genuinely enjoyed was the Stone Golem fight, and I only know that because I accidentally broke the platform that I was standing on. It says something that I wasn’t interested in even trying to play fair by that point. Honestly, I wish all fights felt as fair and chaotic as Zombotron‘s Stone Golem. Many others end up feeling luck-based.

Bugs are also a pretty major problem. You can get caught on the lips of ledges (the solid parts of which aren’t well defined) and die as soon as you unstick yourself, and what seems to be happening is that your fall damage is determined by how long you remain in the air. Spending several second stuck on a ledge counts as being in midair, so falling a couple of feet instead registers the damage as “just fell 6-7 stories.” Zombotron‘s physics are prone to all sorts of weirdness like that; there are occasions where you’ll be pushed around by enemies on both sides while trying to get away from an explosive, and this can be infuriating in tunnels and other places where you can’t jump over them to escape. Sometimes, you’ll blow up because an enemy ignited an explosive and there was no room to get away (and explosives have a range greater than their visual effect would suggest). Other times, small spaces between boxes will shoot you up into the sky unexpectedly, or fail to crush an enemy for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. You can be carried up onto door shutters by walking into them, flip your vehicle during a pair of vehicle sections and struggle mightily to get it back upright, and experience all sorts of other weirdness that it’s impossible to prepare for. Zombotron‘s physics can be a lot of fun when they’re working in your favor, but they can also unexpectedly kill you in numerous aggravating ways that aren’t always fair.

Zombotron‘s visuals have oodles of personality and atmosphere

When I first started playing Zombotron, I thought that its muted colors might cause some of its early areas to blend together, but it didn’t take long before I could recognize areas when the story saw Blaze retreading his steps. Environments also change quite a bit, often reflecting the enemy types you’re bound to find there. It took me awhile to recognize spikes as foreground objects, but otherwise, the visuals go a long way toward creating an atmosphere that’s distinct and memorable. Zombotron‘s music, on the other hand, leans a bit too far into the atmospheric side of the equation. It’s not bad by any stretch, but many tracks are the kind of tense orchestral music that’s easy to tune out in favor of the sound effects, and that’s when the soundtrack isn’t simply relying on ambient soundscapes centered around echoes and reverb rather than melody.

Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Zombotron Review Screenshots

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this Zombotron review

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