Beat the first handful of levels, saw I had about a dozen left, and decided life's too short. I wanted to rate this higher for the fun concept & charmingly dumb comedy, but I can't ignore the sheer lack of entertainment value I got from it. The game pushes you to build up a Pikmin-esque zombie horde which you can use to distract & overwhelm enemies, but either there's a limit on how many zombies can follow you at a time or their AI won't listen because it's just plain shit, and given their janky pathfinding, I'm inclined to pick the second option. And when they do come to your aid, the cheeky bastards then go and eat the brains that you need to regain your health & power-ups - although with that said, the power-ups are quite limited in range, take ages to recharge, and are all frankly a bit crap. The game has a nice spoof retrofuturist setting - i.e. 1950s metropolis but with friendly robots & flying cars - but the actual levels seem to be split between overly vast and sparse exteriors or sprawling labyrinthine interiors, which isn't ideal when the game is rubbish at conveying which way you're meant to go. Each level holds a half-dozen clusters of angry NPCs scattered around aimlessly, waiting to demolish your health in mere seconds, and the combat feels TERRIBLE. You can instantly tear into the craniums of weak starting enemies, but beyond that you get legions of armed cops who must be tediously button-mashed to death before you can recruit them to your cadaverous cause, and so you just have to trudge through level after level of 'punch, punch, punch, zombify' repeated over & over. I did have a glimmer of hope at the first boss fight, in which you play a game of Simon to simulate a pitched dance battle against the chief of police, although the banging covers of mid-century pop classics were slightly let down by the quite badly timed button prompts. But in the end, I just couldn't carry on with the slog that this game was already turning into. R.I.P. Stubbs!

Reviewed on Jan 06, 2024


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