Anime Girls: Highschool of Dead

Genre: Third-Person Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Anime Girls: Highschool of Dead is a Third-Person Shooter released on Nintendo Switch in 2023 and ported to PC in 2024. This game has players taking the role of one of multiple unlockable high school girls using various firearms to fend off wave after wave of zombies.

With a title that begins with “Anime Girls”, you might suspect that this is an “ecchi game”, and in this you would be right… sort of. Despite the title, the girls in this game aren’t really anime-styled, and there’s no nudity to be found here either. Having said that, your starting character is a girl wearing a very revealing miniskirt, and it seems a given that the game was designed with the idea that since you’re behind this character already, you might as well lower the camera to get a nice good look at her rear end in between zombie slaying. I’m not going to defend this, but I’m also not here to judge it – what I care about is whether the game itself is good.

The presentation here is mostly decent, with both the girls you play as and the zombies you fight having some nice 3D models with good detail and decent animation, and I suppose the somewhat generic-sounding fast-paced rock music that plays fits the game’s intense action. The one element here that I think seems substandard is the high school itself, which looks flat, featureless, and doesn’t have any of the little details or personality you would expect to find in a school.

The gameplay has players fighting off waves of zombies that appear on the outskirts of schools, while also gathering up weapons, health, and ammo strewn at specific locations throughout the school, which refill every now and then. Players can only carry one handgun with unlimited ammo and one stronger weapon, and picking up a new weapon automatically replaces the old one. And as ammo seems pretty plentiful, this means players will likely find a gun they like and stick with it through the rest of the game, just refilling health and ammo as needed.

This makes the gameplay pretty monotonous, especially as the zombies you fight lack any real variety – some are faster, some are stronger and can tank more hits, but all seem to just head straight for you without any change in abilities or movement. Or at least they would if this game worked as intended.

See, one of the major problems here is that zombies seem to easily get caught on the environment, trapping them and making them far easier to pick off than they’re supposed to be. Stairwells seem like a particularly difficult part of the environment for them, with zombies often getting trapped at the turn in the stairs, or even stuck on the stairs themselves.

Even if this wasn’t the case, the gunplay here is highly unsatisfying. Your aim is extremely imprecise, and the game seems to compensate for this by making enemies take hits even if your aim is off, a sort of auto-aim that doesn’t actually change where you’re aiming. As if this wasn’t bad enough, enemies in this game are absolute bullet sponges, even if you aim for the head, meaning that players may well opt to play using the shotgun for no reason other than it doesn’t usually take over a half-dozen bullets to down one enemy.

I don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to look at an attractive woman while enjoying their action in a videogame, but Anime Girls: Highschool of Dead doesn’t deliver action that’s worth playing. The poor gunplay and bullet sponge enemies that consistently get caught on scenery just do not make for a fun Third-Person Shooter, and if your main interest is looking at a beautiful girl’s butt… well, it’s not that hard to find such a thing for free on the internet, so maybe do that instead.

tl;dr – Anime Girls: Highschool of Dead is a Third-Person Shooter where players control a beautiful girl fighting off hordes of zombies in a high school. The gameplay here suffers from poor controls and bullet sponge enemies who keep getting caught on scenery, and if your main interest is the hot girls, you’re sure to find something more satisfying to look at with a quick internet search. I suggest you do that instead.

Grade: D+

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