Ultimate Zombies Ate My Neighbors (PC)

In celebration of All Hallow’s Eve, here’s the final of four scary-game reviews by GameCola writer and acclaimed scary person Meteo Xavier. (You can read the previous reviews in this series here, here, and here.)

Ladies and gentleman, Meteo Xavier, the man who will impregnate your future daughter on the day before she gets married to the regional director of Coca-Cola, has brought innovation to the industry with his bizarre interpretation of the English language and masturbated once again into the world of videogame journalism, changing the face of the planet while the words “And on that day, the world was forever changed…” elucidate what to expect in our next evolution.

Meteo Xavier is reviewing a ROM hack!

Ed Semrad somewhere has just died of shame, as his invisible protégé has resorted to the laziest form of journalistic literature known to man. What kind of balls must a man like Meteo Xavier have to review a game he’s already reviewed with a few slight twists and call it an article?* The Editor-in-Chief must be furious!

Well, it’s Halloween Eve for everyone (except the Jewish peoples, who are celebrating Hava Makma where the old Jewish golem delivers seven nights of ghost stories and kosher candy), and I’m out of games to review (except just now I remembered I also have Dracula X: Rondo of Blood on my Wii upstairs…fuck!), so we’re doing this.

Please refer to my Zombies Ate My Neighbors review for the basics.

…

Done?

Oh wait, no; you’re jerking it to Jane Lynch on Glee. Ew. I’ll come back.

…

*knock knock*

Oh good, you’re ready. Anyway, so that’s the basic game. How does the remix hold up?

Ultimate Zombies Ate My Neighbors comes close to living up to its title, but like most other additions, it doesn’t replace the original.

Obviously, the hack doesn’t mean to be the original; it’s meant to be a supercharge to people used to the original. I mean, who the hell is going to play a hack when they haven’t played the original? No one’s going to be able to play this game unless they’re pretty good, I’ll tell you that.

Many of the levels are pretty well designed, I must admit. Someone really took the time to offer a solid remix to a game I’ve played into a science. The good news is this game will righteously tax a serious ZAMN-head like me.

The bad news is that it loses out on balance and flow. It’s difficult right from the get-go and doesn’t build up like the original does. Some great ideas (ants on the football field) get mixed in with some bad ones (two mall levels side-by-side, similarly structured with enemies and such). Other bad news is that this game is so much more frustrating than the original—loads of cheap neighbor shots, and way too many of the tourist neighbors that turn into werewolves.

Also, where are all the damn backyard levels? This version oversaturates the castle and “upper floor” levels, easily the worst levels from the game, where we could’ve used some nice backyard levels to really bring that element back home. There’s also some annoying glitches from time to time and few secrets.

Still, if you need a new fix, and you won’t get as uppity as I do about how these things always come off so much more obviously “hacked” than they should, give Ultimate Zombies Ate My Neighbors a shot. It’s like Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (for whatever worth you get out of that).

* To answer the question, it would be more accurate to call them “squares”. 😛