Atom Zombie Smasher from Blendo Games is a unique take on the zombie genre; the ultimate goal is to evacuate civilians (and later scientists), not kill zombies (or Zed, as they are called in this game). Of course, you'll be killing a lot of zombies anyway as you try to buy time for civilians to evacuate. Atom Zombie Smasher is great fun during the first few campaigns (most of which you will probably lose), but the enjoyment eventually gets dragged down by repetitiveness.

The game is played entirely in a top-down perspective. You must choose cities to evacuate (or destroy) on the campaign map; the cities are then procedurally generated. In most cases, the goal is to evacuate a certain number of civilians (yellow dots) before they are all killed or infected by zombies (pink dots). Later, you'll also have to rescue scientists (blue dots).

At first, you'll have nothing but an evacuation helicopter. As you complete successful evacuations, you'll earn additional mercenaries (artillery, snipers, and infantry) and tools (barricades, land mines, dynamite, and zombie bait). Under the default settings, you'll only ever have four of these, and the four are selected randomly.



Artillery and snipers are placed on buildings, but can be aimed or redirected. Infantry are placed on the streets, but can be ordered around at will. Barricades simply redirect civilians and zombies, land mines explode when zombies reach them, and dynamite must be manually triggered (all at once). Zombie bait, of course, baits zombies. All of these, as well as the evacuation helicopter, gain experience and can be upgraded after gaining a level. You can make your helicopter arrive faster, your artillery reload faster, your zombie bait last longer, etc.

In Atom Zombie Smasher, it's rare that you'll rescue everyone in a city. If you manage to kill all the zombies during the daytime, though, you automatically rescue all remaining survivors. You also secure the city, which has important benefits on the campaign map.

That campaign map is where the game is won. A bar along the bottom tracks victory points. You earn points by rescuing civilians or destroying infected cities. Each city you've secured also gives an extra 20 points per turn. Zombies gain points by killing or infecting civilians, but they also get additional points per turn from every infected city. Cities have an outbreak level of 1-4, with four requiring that the city be destroyed. The zombies gain 10 points per outbreak level per turn.



There are a few points on each victory bar where new developments occur. Zombies become stronger, city gas lines rupture, and larger zombies appear. But you unlock elephant bombs, llama bombs (completely remove zombie presence from territories), and scientists. Scientists can then be rescued and "spent" to research new technology: increased helicopter capacity, multi-shot artillery, faster experience gain, etc.

The campaigns really capture the urgency and panic well. Any time I got a large lead in points it lasted only a few turns as zombies continued to spread. Within the cities, I would restart multiple times in order to squeeze every last point out of the map. The occasional llama bombs gave me brief periods of respite from the zombie hordes, but inevitably within a turn or two the map would be covered in infections.

So far I have only won one campaign, through a combination of a lot of luck and a lot of preparation in the early stages. I secured as many cities as possible as early as possible to get a source of points going. My lead lasted most of the game, but continuously grew narrower and narrower. In the end, I won by 865 points (out of 6000). I remember the exact point totals because Atom Zombie Smasher creates a very detailed log of each campaign. The log can also be exported to a simple .txt file. You can actually read (or download) my entire log at the bottom of this post. Be warned, it's rather long.



I did have a ton of fun playing through that successful campaign. I think I was actually relieved when I finished; I could see my lead shrinking and wasn't sure I was going to earn enough points in time to win. But...I've won a campaign, now what?

Atom Zombie Smasher is of course randomized, but I don't think enough to matter in the long run. The cities are random, but they all end up playing rather similarly. The spread of zombies, the mercenaries you are given, the assorted effects that change each day (slower helicopter, faster zombies, longer daylight, etc.) add variation, but the gameplay remains essentially the same.

You can alter the campaign itself, making it shorter or longer by changing the required total points. There are a good amount of modifiers you can enable as well. You can unlock all the mercenaries, allow an extra one to be taken into a city, allow multiple mercenaries of the same type, or add the option to choose which mercenaries to take. You can make the campaign Casual or Hardcore, and even add permadeath (no mission restarts). Zed spawning can even be moved from the city edges to the center of the city.



There are also "vignettes" to collect that elaborate on the story, background, lore, etc. There are 30 total and I only have 13 so far. There are a few other extras to check out: a short dev journal and behind the scenes section, both of which are worth reading. Your career stats are also tracked in the same area.

So yes, I'll probably get a few more campaigns in. Perhaps I'll try a long, hardcore campaign, or a quick and easy one but with permadeath. Who knows?

There is one feature that could completely turn around the replay value. Atom Zombie Smasher supports user-made mods, which can be made, uploaded and downloaded from within the game. At the moment, I'm somewhat unimpressed. There are a few mods that look interesting, but the vast majority seem to be either cheats or mods from authors who couldn't be bothered to change the description from "This is an example mod from Atom Zombie Smasher."



There is a rating system in place but I'm not sure it is very effective. There is one mod way at the top with a rating of 765, followed by mods at 292 and 214. Then there are four mods at 101 rating...but they're all useless "test" mods with the example description. A download counter might be a helpful metric to add, at least until the ratings even out. But there are mods from January 2011 that look like serious, interesting mods, and they barely scratch a rating of 10, so maybe they won't be evening out anytime soon.

I should also mention that Atom Zombie Smasher includes co-op play between up to three people. I have not tried this at all, so I don't know how it works (or how well it works). It's a nice addition, regardless.

Atom Zombie Smasher can be purchased for only $10, which seems like a fair price to me. The game will keep you entertained (and challenged!) for hours, and can be extended with mods and potentially co-op play. There are things that could be down better, and more content wouldn't hurt (additional campaign maps, or mercenaries, or zombie types, etc.), but Atom Zombie Smasher is well-designed in pretty much every area. There is a demo available, though, and I almost always recommend trying a demo before buying a game, when possible. Of course, if you purchased the 3rd Humble Indie Bundle, you already own a copy of Atom Zombie Smasher and a bunch of other great games.