GAME: The Walking Zombie 2: Zombie Shooter by Alda Games

GENRE: FPS, adventure

PLATFORMS: Android, iOS

Zombies have existed in pop culture for more than half a century now and have been literally done to death. Walking Zombie 2 (WZ2) brings that zombie theme to mobile and checks all the boxes for being a survival shooter game.

The story starts this way. The hero is about to be born when his mother turns into a zombie. However, the baby hero survives and grows up to be the Chosen One. You play that hero in this FPS (first-person shooter) game, which has a full-blown storyline and RPG (role-playing game) elements to it. If you’ve played any PC adventure games, you’d be familiar with this format of the hero going around exploring lands, fighting enemies and bosses, interacting with other characters and solving their problems. WZ2 takes all those features and simplifies them for the mobile phone.

The gameplay involves completing missions to advance the story. Each mission makes you go to a location, kill waves of zombies and collect, repair or destroy something important. In the process, you get better gear and weapons. You also get to choose which skills to level up to suit your play style. The map isn’t exactly open-world; every location is a confined level, but you’re free to visit any location at any time.

Because of the low-poly graphics, WZ2 is not scary at all, to the point that some zombies almost look cute. The dialogues too have blunt humour that makes this grim world even less serious. The controls are quite simple and the general feel is more arcadey than hardcore survival. WZ2 is by no means a short game; the story and missions are easily worth up to 40 hours of playtime, that is, if you can play it till then.

WZ2 tries to be a jack of all but ends up being a master of none. It does a great job of being as vast as a PC game while being simple enough for mobile. But in the process, most features lack the depth to be truly enjoyable.

Dialogues take the story forward, but barely contain any emotion in order to be short. The story and challenge both progress at a snail’s pace because of tons of repetitive filler missions. It feels like watching reels; enough variety keeps me hooked, but not more than mildly entertained. Ads and micro-transaction pop-ups are some of the worst I’ve seen. The game remorselessly throws an ad when you open your inventory, even in the middle of a fight where you just want to use your medi-kit.

VERDICT: Walking Zombie 2 is a surprisingly vast yet simple mobile game that promises to be the complete package of a survival FPS with story and RPG elements. Delivering on that promise, the game has everything, but everything is rather mediocre. The ads and micro-transactions are irritating to say the least, and just add more triggers to stop playing. The graphics and setting of this zombie world are kind of humorous but don’t do much to give it a personality. I would rate it 6.5 out of 10.