Plight of the Zombie Review

It’s tough being a zombie in a non-zombie’s world. Simply walking down the street can be dangerous if a trigger-happy oxygen breather takes notice. And don’t even get me started on what it must be like to try and find a snack. But that’s actually just what Plight of the Zombie is all about: zombies searching for morsels and the humans who would stop them.

Each level in Plight of the Zombie consists of turning all the humans and nabbing as many brains as possible. Moving the adorable little corpses simply requires dragging a path for them to follow while tapping them will cease their movement for a few moments, which is handy for synchronizing multiple zombies. Clearing out people, specifically the gun-toting folks, can make getting around much easier in addition to creating more minions. Eating brains, on the other hand, goes towards unlocking new levels and earning coins needed for custom zombie apparel.

There’s a surprising amount of strategy to many of Plight of the Zombie’s levels. Some brains disappear after a set time limit and need to be snagged quickly, different types of zombies have different strengths and weaknesses to be exploited, enemy movement and firearm range has to be considered, and often all of these factors (and several zombies) have to be balanced at the same time. It can sometimes be difficult to pull off, but watching a complicated plan involving four-plus zombies attacking from different angles or misdirecting the armed humans come together is incredibly satisfying.

Plight of the Zombie does have a few control snafus that are fairly typical of the genre, including the occasional “slightly off” path drag and incorrect unit selection. However these problems don’t crop up often enough to be a huge issue and can almost always be worked around. The larger annoyance is the length of time it takes to actually play a level as it takes quite a long time to complete that initial startup, and once it finally does the loading between levels or when restarting a current one will get in the way. I’m also rather puzzled about the reasoning behind making players download extra level packs (free level packs) from within the game rather than simply making them available from the start. It’s unnecessarily convoluted in my opinion.

Even with it’s failings, Plight of the Zombie is a great path-drawing puzzle game. The various zombie and enemy types, as well as the unique challenges they provide, make it feel unexpectedly fresh despite all the decay.