Zombies Took My Daughter!
Zombies took your daughter. Go kill them and get her back. See you all next week!
Alright, alright. The game is actually far more in depth than a simple "Zombies you kill boom headshot"-fest. A few things hide this fact - the cartoony art design makes it seem overly childish from the off, the zombies are your standard "slavering lunatics" kind, and you use improvised weaponry such as chainsaws and Molotov cocktails, like in every zombie game/film/book ever.
Now I've had a shot at everything you could tell from the game by looking to the right, I'll take you into the minutiae. The premise is basic - in the over-riding panic from the zombie outbreak, your daughter, Anna, is lost somewhere in the city. Fortunate enough to get to the military cordon, you head into the city to find her, where she will be hiding in one of the buildings. However, there are 25 regions, each with five areas, and while not all areas have accessible buildings, some areas have more than one. This results in about 125 possible places she may be hiding. Also, you only have 36 hours to get her back to the safe zone, or the ferry will leave, and moving to another area or getting knocked out costs you time. How can you hunt her down? By searching the dead for information on where she might be. Rather, each search will tell you one particular area where she is not, and from there, narrow down the places she is. Information can be gathered in other ways, such as by killing escaped convicts or collecting supplies in a region. You move from area to area using an original and ingenious series of- nah I'm just jacking with you, you go through the subway. Fortunately, you don't have to navigate while down there, just select where you want to go from a map, that very usefully is colour coded and labelled with areas you know she isn't.
Controls are easy enough to grasp - Left/A to move left, Right/D to move right, C changes weapon, Space attacks, Down/S allows you to hide from unaware zombies, X is use ladder, and Enter opens your PDA. Buildings can be accessed from windows or doors, but the windows can be on any floor, forcing you to use a very Spelunky [http://www.spelunkyworld.com/]-esque ladder, which costs you $5 game money. This can, however, result in you having an area to visit, but not enough money to reach it. Once you access these rooms, they can contain anything from an RPG, survivors, money or information. The array of options means that you will be tentatively visiting every possible room, unsure of what to expect.
The game is randomly generated, which means it is different every time you play. This means not just a different game every time, but a different length. The first time 'round, I was skulking through the city, assassinating zombies at will, second time around, she was in the third room I checked in the second region I visited.
While not exactly original, the game has enough ideas to get you through it, even when the ammo crates break gameplay slightly when you're wandering around with an army's supply of assault rifles, and you realise survivors have infinite ammo.
Help! 'Zombies Took My Daughter!' took my free time!
