All Zombies Must Die! is a little late to the party, bringing its quirky and lighthearted art-style to a formula that has already been covered by many other games. The developers were clearly aware of that and added some twists to it that could have easily made it a great addition to the genre, but poor design choices keep them from really having much impact. Played from an overhead view, you and up to three others can punch, bat, and shoot their way through the zombie hordes.
It controls well enough, with your character smoothly responding to where you want to move them and where you want to attack. The developers definitely got that part right, and you get a reasonable variety of weapons to use on the undead. Where All Zombies falters is the details around that, bogging the player down with things that intentionally bring in MMO style grinding (and it even makes jokes about this), along with a lot of needless backtracking and fetch-quests. Yes, it is neat that you can improve your characters by spending points on their stats (health, movement speed, defense against attacks, and how much damage they do per hit) or build special weapons based on stuff you found lying around. However, repeatedly having to kill X number of zombies to get said materials, then Y more zombies, then doing it all over again in level after level quickly wears thin.
Even that would be okay, but for a few major issues: the aforementioned backtracking and similar quests introduce a lot of ’dead time’ where you’re just traveling and not having fun, plus co-op is limited to local play only. A relatively weak game absolutely can be saved by convenient multiplayer, and there are several titles in the Xbox Live Arcade catalog that prove it. Unfortunately, a lack of online play really cuts into your pool of potential players. This won’t be a problem for some, but this is a 2011 release and All Zombies is competing in a genre where some other games do let you team up with people over the internet. Doing less than your competitors is not generally a good idea, though I will concede that if you can round up some local players then this is a decent romp.
Perhaps to compensate for this, All Zombies tries to lay the humor on pretty thick. Its whimsical art style is definitely an unusual but nice choice for blasting through zombies, letting you know the game isn’t going to be overly pretentious and self-important. Much of the game’s dialogue simmilarly takes shots at game cliches, hoping to get a few chuckles out of you. It succeeds at first, but after a while "isn’t this just like in a video game?" wears thin, especially when it keeps pounding you with the same cliches it’s mocking; going out to kill a certain number of zombies explicitly to get what is called a ’loot drop’ gets old in a hurry, and being reminded that’s precisely what you’re doing asks the question: why not rework the game to avoid these problems, instead of just pointing out to us that there is a significant flaw here?
For everything interesting All Zombies Must Die! accomplishes with its weapon crafting system and RPG level-up mechanics, it undoes that by boring the player with too much dead time between interesting tasks, limiting their multiplayer options, and entering a market that has already covered ’zombie-killing twin-stick shooter’ quite well. While not a truly bad game, it fails to become particularly good. At $10 USD/800 Microsoft Points, I cannot recommend it for purchase when it’s going head-to-head with the Zombie Apocalypse series ($1, "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1NIT!!!1" (Xbox Live Indie Games, $1/80 MSP), or even the Dead Rising 2 ’Case’ releases ($5/400 MSP and $10/800 MSP, not twin-stick shooters, but similar in theme and RPG/weapon-combo mechanics). Both late and underwhelming compared to its peers, it’s hard to see how this release is relevant.
