Splatter – Zombiecalypse Now

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1-4 Co-Op / Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

Splatter -Zombiecalypse Now (not to be confused with Splatter, which has nothing to do with this game) is a 2-Stick Shooter released on PC in 2014 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. Players take the role of a man shooting his way through a zombie apocalypse as he hunts for its source.

In terms of presentation, Splatter makes use of detailed top-down 2D environments and characters, with animation that’s not great but is sufficient enough for the gameplay. However, there are a few areas where this game’s visuals are surprisingly good. Firstly, enemies you gun down remain on-screen, leaving a huge pile of zombie corpses, viscera, and blood that makes for a rather impressive mess on what may have previously been a pristine space. What’s more, despite the 2D visuals, this game makes pretty good use of lighting and shadows in a way that adds depth and atmosphere, with your gun’s flashlight illuminating your enemies and casting shadows behind them.

These visuals are backed by a fittingly moody and atmospheric soundtrack, and supported by voice acting that’s… well, pretty inconsistent, actually. This may have something to do with this game’s confusing tone issue.

Honestly, I can’t tell if this game’s story is going for a “hard-boiled” sort of tone and failing abysmally, or if it’s going for a parody of that sort of tone but not quite nailing the comedy. Either way, the combination of the dark monochrome still-frame cutscenes and the attempt at gritty over-dramatic narration by the game’s grizzled protagonist just seems odd and at times outright silly. It’s not bad, but it definitely seems like whatever dramatic direction it was aiming in, it could have used more work to get it there.

While the presentation has its ups and downs, overall the gameplay here is pretty solid. There’s nothing here that truly revolutionizes the genre of 2-Stick Shooters, but this is still a pretty excellent entry in the genre, with decent controls, good variety of enemies, a healthy variety of scenarios to tackle, plenty of hidden secrets, and a decent variety of choices for weapon upgrades. Also, because I have to mention it and I’m not sure where else in this review it makes any sense, I have to say that the frog zombies are a wonderfully original touch.

I do have a number of complaints here regarding the campaign, but they’re mostly minor. First, your character’s walking speed is a bit sluggish, and this combined with the lack of a map can make for a few places throughout the game’s campaign where you’re not sure where to go and it can be tedious exploring around to find your way. Also, the enemy AI is frequently dumb, and not just because they’re zombies – enemies often get caught on scenery or ignore your presence, making it easy to pick them off. Finally, the difficulty throughout the campaign seemed uneven – if you’re managing to keep the zombies at bay, it feels like a cakewalk, but the moment you get swamped you will find yourself dying very very quickly. None of these bring down what is otherwise excellent gameplay, but they are worth mentioning.

I should also mention the game’s two multiplayer modes – one competitive, and one cooperative. I’ll tell you right now that the competitive multiplayer in this game is terrible – the game broadcasts your spawn so far in advance that it makes it easy for others to spawn camp you, and otherwise there seems to be little strategy to this game mode. The co-op Survival mode fares somewhat better here, with players working together to fend off waves of zombies. The issue with this mode is that if one player dies before their comrades, there’s no way for teammates to bring them back, meaning they just have to sit and wait until the rest of the group fails. Then of course there’s the obvious complaint I can make about the co-op in this game – you can’t play the campaign in co-op.

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot in Splatter that could do with improvement. The game’s tone can’t seem to pick a lane, the campaign could do with some tweaking, and the multiplayer could do with a serious overhaul. But despite these issues, I still found this game to be a very enjoyable 2-Stick Shooter, and players looking for a fun game to blast some zombies in the top-down perspective will likely find this to be an excellent choice.

tl;dr – Splatter -Zombieocalypse Now is a Top-Down 2-Stick Shooter where players blast away hordes of zombies. There are numerous small issues with this game’s tone, its gameplay, and its multiplayer, but overall this is a pretty enjoyable entry in the genre, and its better qualities far outweigh the bad. Definitely worth a look if you’re down for some zombie-killin’ action.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2022 Game Awards:

Winner:

Most Underrated (57) – First, full disclosure – Splatter is a game I got as a review code from publisher Untold Tales. However, I think it would win this award even if that wasn’t the case. Is Splatter a great game? No. Does it do anything truly great or revolutionary within its genre? No. Can it compete in any significant way with the likes of Enter the Gungeon, Assault Android Cactus, NeuroVoider, or countless other 2-Stick Shooters on the Nintendo Switch? No. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile in its own right, and I found this game to be decent and reasonably enjoyable, well worth its low $8 price tag. For what this game offers, I would expect a low Metacritic score, but a score in the 50s? That’s absurd. This may not be a great game, but it’s better than that.

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