by Geir Gunnarsson
Ah zombies, so prevalent in pop culture these last 2 decades or so. We’ve gotten all kinds of zombie games through the years: survival, fps, tower defense, you name it.
Dustoff Z is trying something new (I think as I have not played every single zombie game and there could be one out there similar to Dustoff Z). Dustoff Z is a 2.5D sidescroller with a low poly art style which works quite well.
The premise of the game is you are a helicopter pilot tasked with finding and rescuing people stuck because of zombies. You can unlock and buy different helicopter and upgrade them, recruit gunners and upgrade them. Each mission has you fly out and look for survivors or supplies to bring back to your base. You have limited fuel, ammo and armour and you need to manage these things if you want to finish the mission.
You collect resources so you can upgrade your helicopter, gunners and to buy new helicopters. Each helicopter has different qualities, for example more seats for survivors or gunners, more armour or speed. Zombies will sometimes drop health, ammo and fuel pickups and you’ll need to maneuver around the surviving zombies to pick them up if you want to survive.
The zombies come in all shapes and sizes: slow lumbering ones, the fast jumping ones, the fat exploding kind and a ranged one that spits or vomits on you. Then there are bosses, giant zombies that will often take the whole screen and make it quite difficult for you to evade.
The gameplay is extremely simple, use the control stick to fly up and down, left and right. Y button lowers the hook with which you can pick up numerous things like turrets, bombs and mission critical items.
The triggers tell the gunners to open fire though the targeting is done automatically and can be quite frustrating to utilize since they appear never to aim at the zombie you want them to which results in a chaotic flight pattern in trying to take out the nearest enemies instead of some random one miles away. This usually ends up with you flying in circles trying to kill a certain zombie, but you just end up getting swamped by the faster, jumpy zombies.
There are environmental hazards that you can utilize to take out a pack of zombies which can be quite satisfying.
The bosses are huge and nicely designed and combat against them becomes a dance of avoidance and shooting. Once a boss is dead you unlock a new gadget that you can attach to the helicopter to help in numerous situations.
I unlocked a minigun for the nose of the helicopter and unfortunately it operates the same as the gunners i.e. auto targeting which results in more frantic and chaotic flying to get the gunners AND the minigun to target the correct enemy.
In conclusion the game can be fun but also considerably frustrating in having a certain amount of control taken away from you. A game worth getting if you like some mindless fun and maybe something a little different from the traditional zombie fare.
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