Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we’ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome. Here is one cool enough to keep you busy during this weekend.
Zombie Gunship ($ 0.99 Universal) is a castle defense sharp-shooting game in which you engage zombies from a secure position overhead. Being so far away may help preserve your life, but it makes keeping zombies on the ground from reaching your base much more difficult.
Circling overhead in an apocalyptic gunship outfitted with an arsenal of zombie-killing armaments, the game controls take on more of a sharpshooter feel than a first-person shooter feel. You can switch between different caliber guns as you are flown around in the airship. While you don’t control the gunship, the scope fitted on each gun provides adequate viewing of the battlefield. Each type of gun has a different scope fitted to it that exposes a different section of the battlefield. While the 105MM Howitzer will show a larger section of the battlefield, the 25MM Gatling Gun gives you a more close-up look at what is going on. A little green light on your night vision scope will point in the direction of the base you need to protect.
It is not just the different viewpoints that separates each style of gun; the kill zone, reload time, speed of fire, and other characteristics of each gun are factors as well. Choosing the correct weapon is important based on the situation at hand. It all depends on how many zombies there are, and how close they are to human survivors. It is not just the bunker that you are protecting, you are also providing cover fire to create a clear path through the zombies for friendlies to pass. Electing to fire the Howitzer at a large group of zombies may not be such a good idea if human survivors are nearby.
Each mission you are rated not only on how may zombies you kill, but also how many survivors you manage to help save. As surviving humans run across the battlefield towards the safety of the base, zombies try to overtake the humans and kill them. While you are rated by how many humans make it into the base, you are not adversely affected by how many humans are killed by zombies on the way to the base. In fact, too much friendly fire will end a mission. Trying to take out a zombie that is attacking a human is not always worth it. You need to plan things out ahead of time and keep the zombies from getting too close in the first place.
You earn coins by being successful in each mission and they can be used to upgrade your weapons. For instance, you can keep your Gatling Gun from overheating by upgrading to a faster cooling mechanism, or you can instead elect to reduce the time it takes to reload your Howitzer. Unfortunately the kill zone of each weapon can only be increased rather than decreased. This makes it even more difficult to help struggling human survivors, so it makes sense to just let them go. You have to know the exact area of effect each weapon has before attempting to save humans under attack. The worst-case scenario is when a survivor makes it to the entrance of the base, accompanied by a pack of zombies all around them. You can’t let the zombies in, and you can’t kill the human survivor, creating a no-win scenario.
There are in-app purchases where you can purchase additional coins and upgrade your gunship more quickly. But no amount of upgrades can keep the onslaught of zombies from coming. Fortunately game progress is synced via iCloud so you can continue the fight on all of your iOS devices.
This weekend plan on doing some end of the world prepping, as you get ready for the coming zombie apocalypse.
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