Zombo Buster Advance

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

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Review:

Zombo Buster Advance, released in 2020 on PC, ported to Nintendo Switch in 2021, then ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2022, is the successor to Zombo Buster Rising. After the previous game incorporated elements of Tower Defense into its Arcade gameplay, this successor heads completely into the realm of Tower Defense, more specifically lane-based Tower Defense, where players must place different sorts of combatants to fend off invading zombies.

The presentation here is fairly similar to the previous game, using cartoony 2D visuals with zombie character designs that once again resemble the zombies in the Plants Vs. Zombies franchise. This is backed by a forgettable soundtrack that gets the job done, but doesn’t do much more than that.

Zombo Buster Advance does one fairly original thing to set it apart in the field of lane-based Tower Defense games, and that is its “elevator” system – players can place three units on each floor of an elevator to fight off zombies, and must swap these elevator floors on the fly to end off new threats as they show themselves. It’s a clever idea, but it doesn’t seem quite as integral to the strategy as one would hope, and the limitation of only three units per floor is ultimately a bit stifling.

That just leaves the rest, which is thankfully a pretty decent Tower Defense game. It’s a bit slow-paced, which can be tedious and frustrating, but on the bright side of things the game’s upgrade system is really well-crafted, giving players a lot of potential improvements to work toward and even grind if they want to.

In the end, there’s nothing truly game-changing about Zombo Buster Advance, but it is a perfectly respectable lane-based Tower Defense game all the same, and fans of the genre will find this to be well worth getting ahold of, especially at the low $4 price this game is selling for.

tl;dr – Zombo Buster Advance ditches the Arcade-style gameplay of the predecessor and places the focus squarely on lane-based Tower Defense. This is a pretty good take on the genre, if a bit slow-paced and lacking in anything truly unique or groundbreaking. I believe fans of this style of game will find it well worth the low $4 price tag.

Grade: B-

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