Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia

Verdict: A zombie-bashing game with hordes of the undead to cut down to size, but few surprises to inspire you to keep fighting

Unlike many of their supernatural brethren, Zombies lack the ability to shape-shift, fly, turn invisible or invincible or even move at a faster pace than the queue at Tesco. This hasn’t stopped film makers like George Romero (Dawn of the Dead) and Danny Boyle (28 Days later) from having some fun with them, so it’s a shame that Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia, a new zombie kill-a-thon game, doesn’t break stride from the usual zombie clichés.

The game puts you in control of four stereotypical cartoon teenagers as you defend your town from an undead invasion in a 3^rd person shooter. Right from the first level where the zombies turn up at your front door looking for 'Brraaaiiinnnnssss!', you must defend yourself with axes, kitchen knives and toilet plungers in order to drive the zombies out of your neighbourhood for good.

The single player campaign (which you can also play cooperatively with up to three friends), puts you in control of one of the four characters as you clean up your infested city. The multiplayer part of the game pits you against your friends in either a four-player deathmatch on a single computer, or a sixteen player game online or over LAN.

The four main characters are Zack (the geek), Carrie (the Goth), Andy (the home boy) and Jennifer (the dumb, blonde cheerleader). The plot is shown in well drawn comic-strip cut scenes, in which you are told ‘Dude, the neighbourhood is screwed man!’ and that ‘I broke a nail!’

As you’d expect, each character has their own special weapon and abilities with which to deal out higher levels of pain and suffering. You can buy new weapons and weapon upgrades from the local mechanic and you pay for these new weapons by collecting items which are littered around each level, as well as tokens which each zombie drops when it dies. Other objects of doom are found lying around ranging from lawnmowers to samurai swords.

The game supports the Xbox 360 gamepad, although you can still use a mouse and keyboard. Controlling your character is fairly simple; you use the WASD keys to move backwards and forwards, as well as strafing, while the mouse is used to turn you character around and the left and right buttons are used to attack. However, it’s suicide to attempt any mission without the ‘enemy autotarget’ enabled, since you won’t stand a chance of hitting anything.

New zombie-infested areas are introduced each level, whilst more powerful and aggressive zombie mutations are thrown in throughout the game, with a cut scene for each one showing their name and abilities. However, it’s hard to get away from the fact that almost every level in the game is essentially the same: kill wave after wave of zombies whilst trying to stay alive. After the first two or three levels, your mind will be reduced to a zombie-like state, and your index finger will have swelled to giant proportions after the huge amount of clicking involved in cleansing the world of zombies.

Of course, any game wouldn’t be complete without a UFO in which to fry zombie hordes with a Laser Death Beam. Later on, you’re let loose in an array of vehicles and ships in which to drive back the zombie invaders. Unfortunately, the controls have been poorly implemented and can’t help but make you cry when your character announces ‘Check out my l33t skillz!’ just before your ship is sunk by zombie pirates because you couldn’t move out of the way in time.

As the game has been created using the Unreal Engine, it looks great: flaming zombies burn realistically whilst you throw Molotov Cocktails into their masses and the maps are covered with high detail items. However, this is when lighting and post-process effects are enabled. Without these, the game looks more like it was made five years ago than a game in the Unreal 1 Engine. Beauty comes at a price, as the game was unplayable at maximum settings on our test system. Despite comprising a GeForce 7900 GTX, 4GB RAM and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+, it only managed a pitiful minimum framerate of 9fps and an average of 22 fps at 1280 x 1024 with all of the settings at maximum. At minimum settings the game was a lot smoother but considerably uglier.

The game’s physics are good, being of the Half Life 2 standard, with zombies being realistically propelled across the map once they make contact with your parents’ favourite lampshade. Widescreen resolutions are also supported, so the new monitor that you invested in won’t go to waste. Sound quality is also very high, with zombie screams and your character telling you that ‘Zombies have eaten my neighbours’ reaching your ears in the highest quality.

All of the makings of a great game are present, but Monster Madness is let down by poor vehicle controls, lack of varied game play too few original ideas.

The official site is www.monster-madness.com and you can get the latest patch from http://www.southpeakgames.com/support/MMBFSsupport.htm. You can buy the game from www.play.com for £11.99.

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