Corpse Mob Review

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the zombie craze started. Some say 28 Days Later in 2002, or Dawn of the Dead a couple of years later in 2004. Others go back as far as George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in 1978. Of course, it’s hard to ignore The Walking Dead, too, although I’d say that Rick and co. have just managed to sustain interest over a longer period of time.

But here we are in 2018, with the zombie virus still infecting a large part of our medium. You’ll find all kinds of weird and wonderful types of these born again creatures in Corpse Mob, a top-down arcade shooter with thousands of the undead approaching from the outer forest, within which you are trapped with no way out.

That description alone pretty much sums up the entirety of the game. You choose one of four characters – two males, two females, of course – and go to town. Weapons will randomly spawn on the ground for you to pick up, along with a selection of power-ups, ranging from increased speed, God mode, and a “Juggernaught” which places a rotating chainsaw-esque perimeter around your character, amongst others.

You can use a gun or a handheld weapon, but as you get past Wave 4 when flaming dogs that blow up start chasing after you, it gets pretty difficult to defeat anything with any of the handhelds. The axe and katana are good, but their range is just too short and often they seem to just miss. The exception is the chainsaw. You can just spin it up and force your way through, unless you come up against the big pregnant zombies. They take no prisoners. It does need fuel, though, and when you’re running around you do tend to end up walking into another handheld weapon – like a baseball bat or the aforementioned axe – and lose the chainsaw.

Other weapons don’t suffer from lack of fuel, thankfully: You get a specific amount of ammo with each type of gun. If you pick up another, it basically tops it up again to the max you can carry. The best I find is either the sub-machine gun or the shotgun. The others are OK, but don’t come with a whole load of ammo before you’re waiting for another gun to spawn somewhere. It’s good to get a load of zombies lined up to zap with a laser gun, made easier by placing a Decoy on the floor to attract their attention.

There are six different types of zombies, and you’ll see them all by Wave 6. After each round, you get two points you can use to upgrade various parts of your character; Max HP, Ammo, Speed and Damage. This only applies to each game, but you also unlock permanent tokens so you can apply these before the start of each match. I got enough after a couple of hours of play to completely max the Damage stat, meaning I could concentrate on the others in the game. Upgrading your Max HP doesn’t really seem worth it for the little gain that you get, so getting the Ammo and Speed stats up were my priorities.

After killing a certain amount of zombies of each type, you’ll unlock a boss that you can fight in a separate section of the game. These are difficult, and the first you’ll unlock is “Stalkers”, and I still don’t even know what I’m supposed to do. There are zombies around that are like ghosts and don’t move, but they move around when you shoot…after a while you just end up dying.

These boss fights are the only things that repetitive play will earn you. There aren’t any additional weapons, characters, or anything of that nature to be unlocked. It really is a “what you see is what you get” kind of game. There is multiplayer, but it’s restricted to local only. I preferred to play with a controller, but you can mix and match between keyboard and mouse alongside controllers.

What Organic Robot Games have done so far is good. Smooth graphics, and the music that plays through isn’t too obnoxious. There’s just nothing that sets it apart from any other games in this genre, of which there are many. It is their first game, and I think we have plenty of recent examples where developers go for the ambitious features that they will never be able to implement and end up with a half-baked game, with a ton of issues. Corpse Mob is just one of those games that you might play a couple of games of here and there when you’re bored. And for £1.69, I don’t suppose there’s much more you can really expect.