Zombie Driver is a top down, arcade style driving game from newcomers, Exor Studios. Take to the zombie infested streets in a variety of upgradable vehicles, running over and shooting zombies, while rescuing civilians. It's like the antithesis of the classic Spy Hunter. Instead of trying to avoid your enemies, the objective is to run them over. To complete this rather insightful juxtaposition, one need only point out that spies are generally clever, whereas zombies are not. Click here to read more.

The school bus has excellent ramming power and passenger capacity

The basic plot is straight out of a B-movie; after a routine explosion at a chemical plant, the dead decide that walking around eating people is more fun that being dead. The non-entity that is the protagonist escapes the carnage in a taxi, before embarking on seventeen missions for the stereotypically condescending military man, General J. Bloford. Unfortunately, these missions are linear and incredibly repetitive, and the only objective types are killing zombies and rescuing civilians. Completing missions makes new vehicles available, unlocks upgrades, and nets you the money to buy those upgrades. There are a decent selection of vehicles, including the police cruiser, the rather nifty sports car, the limousine, and the extremely spacious bus. Each vehicle has a specific passenger capacity and a number of stats armour, speed, and ramming power; apart from passenger capacity these stats can each be upgraded three times to make your vehicles more efficient. Vehicles can also be a equipped with a weapon to increase its lethality; available choices include machine guns, flame throwers, and rockets. Weapons are especially useful when faced with a gathering of zombies which is too dense to effectively ram.

The sports car: fast and fun, but don't try to fit 16 fire-fighters in it!

Zombie Driver's focus isn't on story-telling, strategy, or upgrades. Zombie Driver exists so you can drive around at insane speeds grinding zombies underneath your wheels while cackling manically to yourself, and it does this pretty well. Zombies, zombie dogs, and giant zombies, which we might call tanks, all slide under the hood of your vehicle as you tear around at breakneck pace, chaining combos for greater cash rewards and avoiding exploding zombies... which, ahem... we might call boomers. There is a time limit for reaching the survivors, and zombies can generally only inflict damage when you aren't moving. It's also an incredibly simple game: beyond choosing which vehicle to take at the beginning of each mission and getting a feel for the amount of zombies that can be run over without losing momentum, there's effectively no strategy involved. Zombie Driver is all about reflexes and you will need them; it gets pretty difficult near the end.

Ah yes! The old rocket launcher on the school bus routine.

The graphics and audio components are bog standard, roughly as much as we are able to expect from a game which sells for around $10. The camera angle isn't great though; it's too close to the action, and it's smart mode can be disorientating while reversing. The lack of a map is also quite annoying. Most people will finish the game in around four hours, and I doubt many will return for a second helping. Zombie Driver could have greatly benefited from open world, rather than linear game-play. Furthmore, some additional complexity or nuance would have been nice, but even as it is, Zombie Driver will appeal to fans of retro/arcade/driving games.