I'm disappointed in Zombie Tycoon 2: Brainhov's Revenge , and if you crave strategy games and brains, you might be too. An opening campaign mission gives a taste of the fun we could've had ordering a horde of zombies to chase the remains of mankind through a ruined suburb. It's the classic promise of power we've seen time and again: whet our appetites with a taste of what's to come, then take it all away, and make us feel primed to earn it back. Only here, you're chasing something that doesn't exist. Zombie Tycoon 2 certainly starts out looking like a deep real-time strategy game on a handheld, but it isn't long until it becomes obvious it's dead on its feet.

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Oddly, the first thing you'd imagine would feel wrong is one of the few things that goes right – the controls. Tradition dictates that RTSes only work with a mouse and keyboard, but Zombie Tycoon 2 sidesteps the issue by limiting you to as only many unit squads as you have face buttons, and tying abilities for your single hero-like monster units are mapped to the d-pad for fairly easy access. You won't be stutter-stepping or focus-firing with a scheme this basic, but combat has been wisely designed with such limitations in mind, and missions never demand any more precision than the controls afford.I wish the same forethought had also gone into tailoring the campaign map designs to those limitations. You've only got access to two small squads of undead infantry, a monster unit, and your mobile command vehicle, and they all have two speeds: slow, and slightly less slow. That's entirely fine if the action is confined to small, focused maps, but the sprawling, convoluted layouts these missions take place in are anything but. Objectives are scattered haphazardly across each massive level, with little regard to logical flow. Shambling your way back to the side of the map you just came from to complete a new task is annoying the first time, but when kept happening I had to wonder if the designers are just trolling us.Given the humor on display though, I'd be surprised, because the rest of the jokes generally work. Is the story on display riveting? No, but it does manage to find the charm and humor in pop-culture zombies. This conflict is one that any fan of the undead can take a side in: the eternal battle between fast and slow-moving zombies. Each side sports a surprising level of unit diversity – the in-game codex reveals a wealth of zombie variants with varying stats and tactical specialties. Engineers capture buildings especially quick, brawlers hit like a truck at the expense of speed, and self-regenerating scouts would theoretically excel at guerrilla-style hit-and-run tactics.As mechanically simple as it is, Zombie Tycoon 2 still has all the pieces needed to deliver a competent RTS experience, just that those pieces are literally spread out all over the place. The only way to deploy different units is to send existing ones into specific building types to be converted. In your typical strategy game, all these structures would be bunched together, but since traditional bases don't really exist here you end up traveling coast to coast just to switch unit compositions. And “composition” is more a figure of speech here than anything else, because with only two customizable squads to control at a time there isn't much room for experimentation.Having to choose between wasting several minutes to backtrack or simply pushing through doesn't feel like much of a choice at all, and that's where Zombie Tycoon 2 starts to really fall apart. Much of the single-player campaign requires that you keep a particular unit type handy at all times, and the need to protect your mobile command center around the clock makes every mission feel like an extended escort assignment – and we all know how much fun those are.Of course, just like most RTS games, the campaign here is just an appetizer to prepare you for the online multiplayer. But once I jumped into that, I was left wondering where the entree is. With one game mode, and a single, solitary map, multiplayer proves to be completely anemic. Infantry needs to stay near the command center for reinforcements, which in turn needs the infantry’s protection, so balling up your forces is heavily incentivized. I found myself wanting to send a single squad to scout my opponent’s position, or to capture unit upgrade structures, but without a second squad or the mobile spawner for support, the building’s point defenses just chew them up. With such a straightforward victory condition and a symmetrical map comprised of narrow corridors, it's hard to imagine a practical use for anything but the most hearty of combat units.Effectively utilizing your monster's special abilities proves to be the only meaningful input you have. The aptly named Bearhug monster excels at controlling space with traps, area-of-affect damage, and debuff abilities, where the support specialist Braintrust uses cloaking and scouting abilities to misdirect your opponent. Of course, you’ll rarely get to use them that way since you're always engaged in toe-to-toe battles to take down your opponent’s mobile spawner while defending your own. All that really matters during these sloppy, undead mosh-pits is that you deal as much damage as possible by using the right skill at the right time. And amidst the tedium of trundling along and slowly capturing buildings, it's hardly enough to make a match interesting.These overarching issues conspire with a number of smaller ones to keep Zombie Tycoon 2 from being a good time. Enemy AI often appears brain dead, even by zombie standards, and it's not uncommon to see friends or foes stand around doing nothing. Certain objectives don't trigger events they're supposed to, and there were even a few moments where my troops became completely unresponsive, forcing me to reload entirely. The lack of ad-hoc connectivity is also a real head-scratcher, especially given that the developers went to the trouble to include Cross Buy and Cross Play. The camel's back was already broken, but these last few straws keep it down for the count.