A REVIEW BY IAN CHANDLER

#killallzombies by Beatshapers is a twin stick shooter that retails for the not-unreasonable £3.99 on Steam, and is also available for PS4, X-Box One, and even the much-neglected PS Vita. The Steam version was the one tested here.

The action takes place on a three-quarters overhead view arena with a hexagonal floor which you can scroll about a screen-width in all directions, and plays like a modern-day version of that 90’s arcade classic Smash TV. (showing my age again here….)

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There are 3 Game Modes. Survival which is to kill as many as you as can before they get you, Vault Defence which gives you a base to defend, and Co-Operative which means 2 players can play on the same screen, although you share the one health bar. Hmmm….

Common to all modes, the game eases you in with a simple handgun and a few undead to run around and shoot. If you get very close you can do melee kills but be careful as your energy bar can go down very quickly if you linger amongst the rotting hordes…

After a certain number of undead are killed, you get to select a power up from a selection of 4, which change randomly each time. There are over a hundred of these, certainly too many to list here, but include poison shots, extra time, improved melee damage or smart bomb equivalents that just kill everything. You also get power ups like Health or other weapons that appear randomly on the screen.

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Later levels introduce turrets of spinning spiked poles, vehicles dropping from the sky (the floor flashes red briefly before they appear) falling meteors and even flying saucers.

One of the big selling points Beatshapers are touting is its Twitch streaming interactivity, which enables spectators to issue voice commands which affect the gameplay, by changing player’s stats, spawning more or less zombies or even flip the screen to a different perspective. There is a cool down timer though so at least you can’t be spammed.

I will confess to not testing these features, as there seemed to be a lot of issues getting the stream to work properly. This may well have been due to my connection and you may have more luck.

The minimum specs for this are low so you could pretty much run it on a potato, but even though I am running it on a Ryzen 7 and GTX1080, there was slowdown when a lot of zombies were on screen at once on later levels which seemed odd. I did all the relevant checks and even re-installed the game but there were still these occasional issues which was unfortunate.

And that is basically it. Run around, shoot, repeat. This is definitely a far better 2 player experience, as both you can run about laughing and killing zombies in a variety of gruesome ways, whilst trying not to blow each up. As a Single player game the shallowness of the gameplay is revealed, and means it’s best played in small doses.

Taken in that way, there’s fun to be had here, even though the occasional glitches and overall lack of polish knock a few points off. Still, for less than the price of a Big Mac meal you get a fun little shooter that fans of the genre will enjoy.

- Ian