Infectonator 3: Apocalypse

This is the only game about Zombies where they are not a threat. Infectonator start is promising. Customizing and managing zombies is fun. The overall look is cute and full of details: missions results presented like a news report , characters with different speech bubble depending of their nationalities, levels represents almost each continent in a decent way, funny looking Zeds, ect... However the game difficulty becomes brutal. As I allready mentionned, Humans starts to fight back the outbreak really fast and really hard. They call cops, swat or soldiers and even civilians starts to equip weapons. Making mid- late levels desperates struggle against huge mobs of furious and armed humans. With only 12 zombies in 4 types and the random infection or mutation attributes to increase your "horde"... your tries will be pointless. And I didn't mentionned Cure research, wich is hilarious in difficulty. Lab spawns randomly and then, YOU HAVE TO destroy them. For an average game without any labs destroyed, 60 days or almost 1 hr it's Game Over. There's no other way to counter that and honestly I couldn't even destroy a single one... Add to that random starting unit pools. The fact that like in the game "Majesty" you don't control zombies so they wander almost all the time and miss lone humans. That Infectonator is a near rogue-like game where not every tools are availiable at start: the usual bait to keep you on your toes with limited strategic options... Zombies have a life span of few seconds making every decisions critical. Even buying units after fights is tedious with no automation for refreshing troops... You can't even pause the game to spawn zombies during missions, leading to messy fights that tends to be more calling on your reflexes than your strategic skills ! To conclude, after a while I felt disgusted. This rogue-like pseudo strategy game is bad and frustrating. Maybe if they update some aspects of the game It might be decent otherwise avoid it.

The game play is better than the previous versions, the time pressure is only really there in the beginning trying to destroy the labs to stall the cure where you have to balance between improving your zombies and going for the kill without causing too much of a panic ramping up the human defences. There is a bit of luck involved with the zombies finding all the humans, but well they are zombies after all. The game gets a bit tedious, it takes 5 hours to complete a winning run. The game has rogueish elements, you get xp that gives you points to get advantages(21 in total) for your next run(to get faster in the game and get more points) It would be fine if a play-through would be 1 hour max, or hard enough to not win the game(like ie. Rogue Legacy). They could've done with less regions on the map, or the regions requiring less attacks to be completely destroyed. The difficulty is not that hard: especially if you played the previous Infectonators. The tutorial didn't go as far as explaining what to do once the game really started, it restricted itself to controls and the basic things, but never explained what you needed to do.(altho you figure it out after a bit of gameplay) The music is good, I could listen to it without going mental after five hours, it is one of those soundtracks that is there but not there on the foreground. The graphics are good, very detailed, the only thing that wasn't great is that there is only one race: only white people in Africa and Asia. The amount of different zombies to help you are numerous: 23 different kinds of normal zombies and 12 special ones. They all have their own abilities, and everything feels balanced. Finding combinations that work well together is fun. Is the price too high for this? On first sight it might look like it is, looking like a glorified flash game and simple pixel art. But the depth and details are there. I consider Toge Productions one of the best flash game developers.

The graphics have a fun retro feel, the music has a fun retro feel. Where this game shines is the goofy zombies and different reporters you unlock by completing different objectives. You can unlock and use different supplemental weapons like hand grenades and infecting jars of goo that will be essential as the game progresses. The boss battles put a comic twist on current events and bring some nostalgia to the table. The game isn't particularly difficult. I beat it on my second attempt. With each completion you get a choice of cheat to permanently unlock and activate if you choose. Keep up with research labs, keep up with the missions and you will have more than enough resources for conquest. To summarize, it is all around good fun, especially for the price. I'll be playing again as I haven't figured out how to unlock 5 of the zombies.

I wanted to give this game a 3 star rating, but I could only do that if it had replay value. At the current price of $13 USD it's so not worth the purchase. If the price tag dropped to $6 and if the replay value was there, that would solidify the three star value. Pros: Cute pixel art. Around 30 different zombies to unlock. Charming humor and world atmosphere. The game doesn't take itself seriously. Polish - the U.I. is good, and it's easy to navigate the screens (however the arrow keys dont' function to move around the map if zoomed in, nor does WASD. The agme is entirely mouse driven. Cons: Price - at the price of 13, there isn't enough content. Length - the game can be fully completed in around 8 to 10 hours tops Replay - there isn't any. Once you've unlocked the achievements and completed the game, there is little incentive to replay the title. Balance - The middle to late game steers you into using a few types of zombies. There is little incentive to use all types and expirment, save for in-game achievements that socre you more income, which is necessary to upgrade zombies to high levels - needed for late game. You unlock a lot of zombies, but you will rarely use any of them except in the case wehre the game ofers you a coin reward for doing so. Once you are late game, if you aren't sufficienlty upgraded and using proper types of zombies, you'll be soft-locked and ultimately lose. Gameplay - it's extremely repetitious. That in itself isn't a con, as old games like Contra were the same way. But maps have very little variety, and the objects are always the same (kill 5, 15, 30, etc) zombies, with another infection level being rewarded if you kill all humans on the map. I just find that the game needs more. Weekly challenges for ledgerboards doesn't interest me as it's merley 'play the game, beat the game, with this arbitrary handicap', and 'get a higher coin count than others playing'.