Peach Pie Productions pride themselves on their 16-bit twin shooter, while I was pleased with myself for uninstalling the game and hiding it from my Steam library… To never be seen again.

The game was released on 10th June 2016 by the developer Peach Pie Productions of whom, is just a singular guy called Ben from Kentucky. Zombie Party is aspired to be a 16-bit twin shooter action-RPG and rogue-like. But instead, all I see the game as is a 16-bit shooter with a hint of closing the game.

Zombie Party has four different game modes that you can play which include: Adventure, Dungeon, Arcade and Deathmatch.

Adventure mode puts you in a variety of different level designs and will continually give you waves of enemies until you reach the boss, of whom you’ll then defeat and move onto the next area. Pretty simple gameplay, the boss is the hardest thing about adventure mode.

Dungeon is where the game wants the rogue-like experience but it just doesn’t fit the shoes, instead you’ll run around mindlessly killing off each level and then jump in a hole and repeat. It’s extremely mind-dulling and then, of course you’ll hit a boss who is relatively hard and you’ll continue to play the mind-dulling efforts of dungeon.

Arcade is probably only there if you’re character’s stats are high, as you’ll need to defeat 10,000 zombies within 5 minutes, which sounds easy but there are just so many and with a low-level character it’s near-impossible. It doesn’t help when you can’t see your cursor because it’s just white and it’s in the middle of thousands of bullets somewhere.

Deathmatch was probably my favourite mode because it wasn’t as mind-dulling, but obviously this mode is pretty shocking when it’s just playing with AI in a 1v1v1 on a small and enclosed map. But you can’t play multiplayer because it’s atrocious.

Multiplayer claims it’s been in beta since March, and in 3 months of beta I still feel like it shouldn’t have been released. Once selecting a game, 8 out of 10 times you’ll get an error about how you can’t connect or it’ll attempt to connect hundreds of times to no avail. And 1 out of 10 times you’ll join a game to be greeted with an unfortunate amount of 1s and 0s covering the entire screen and you can’t do anything. However, once you’re in a game you’ll finally think how amazing it is you can finally play with friends! Wrong. Completely wrong.

The level of response that the game will give you when you use your controls is extremely slow therefore making the game almost unplayable and a shocking experience as I feel that since there is no depth in the game such as a story where you’ll continually collect coins by playing and buying stats, characters, guns that multiplayer would be the best option and for this game to work at-all, it needs to be worked on with the highest priority.

According to people in the user forums and comments on the announcements, this isn’t just my computer handling the game, it’s a real issue that is in the game due to the development in Game Maker.

The graphics are 16-bit and therefore don’t look great but they’re in the style where they don’t look bad so I’ll give some credit, although when playing you’ll notice that over half of the enemies aren’t even zombies, and that’s just a let down.

The music is fine, but the sound effects are poorly chosen. An example would be that when you pick up ammo you’ll just here a click, one that you’ll most likely have heard similar in other 16-bit games for when you get hit by a bullet and damaged, but nope. Not this game.

The colour scheme for the game is crazy with so many colours it’s hard to see what’s even going on half the time, and that’s only on the menu! Try actually playing the game.

Clearly the game needs working on, the developer posted before they reached early access that multiplayer was completely fixed, when in fact it wasn’t. Not sure how development is going to go over time but I’d definitely keep watch of this game if you’re into 16-bit twin shooters, because there’s probably some potential… Somewhere.

3/10

Zombie Party was released on the 10th of June 2016, and is currently priced at £5.59 on Steam.