Burn Zombie Burn! features zombies. Zombies that you can set on fire. You probably got that from the title anyway, but I just thought that you’d really want to know; that’s the kind of thing I would want to know. It’s a downloadable game available on the PSN Store for £6.29 and it’s well worth the admission price.

You might be deceived by the look of the game. This is not a twin-stick shooter. Instead, you shoot in the direction you’re looking and the right stick is mostly ignored. R1 will point you towards the nearest zombie and R2 will lock you to the direction you’re facing so you can strafe (which is useful when using the chainsaw). You will find yourself using those two buttons a lot in your fight against the zombie apocalypse.

The game comes with multiple arenas and a lot of zombies to trundle towards you in waves. You earn points primarily by killing said zombies, but if that’s all you do you won’t really get many points at all – the key to this is by building up your multiplier by setting zombies on fire. The more zombies are on fire, the higher your multiplier, but if you kill them or they go out on their own (which they will, eventually), you multiplier drops back down. So the key to getting high scores is setting loads of zombies on fire, then killing those that aren’t or those that are (you get more points for killing a burning zombie), then setting more on fire. Careful though, setting zombies on fire makes them both faster and deadlier, which can result in some amusing situations where you’re running around pursued a mass of 50 zombies, really making you  feel a bit frantic. The whole thing is a risk/reward setup that makes the game relatively simple to pick up but deceptively deep for those who keep at it.

You set them alight by holding R2, which pulls out a convenient constantly-immolated plank of wood or, if you’ve picked one up, a devastating flamethrower that will burn things much quicker than the relatively feeble plank of burning wood could ever hope. You kill the zombies by using one of 5 weapons – there’s the pistol, which is the default and has infinite ammo, then four others that you pick up and take the place of the pistol until you either run out of ammo or drop it (by pressing R3). These are a shotgun, an SMG, a chainsaw, and a bat. You pick them up at spawn points where they respawn at the end of every wave, so you’d better be careful because if you run out of ammo you’re back down to your pistol. The bat doesn’t have ammunition (it is a bat after all), and it can be used by swinging quickly to hit your way through the hordes but doing minimal damage or it can be charged (by holding the attack button) and used to send zombies flying, home run style. There are special weapons that spawn on certain waves, too, but we’ll let you discover them for yourself.

The only other weapon is TNT, which you pick up from non-flaming zombies when you kill (lots of) them, along with health and ammo refills. You then drop the TNT with triangle and, if you like, you can kick it towards some zombies with square. Effective use of this can save your life as well as earn massive amounts of points. Killing burning zombies can cause them to drop upgrades for your TNT, which can increase the blast radius or the type (there are three types of TNT, regular TNT, timed TNT, proximity mines and remote detonated mines, which you detonate with circle. Each type upgrade goes up to the next type of explosive). Useful, but if you die, you’ll lose all of your upgrades, so try not to let them kill you. Not that you’d let them do that anyway, of course.

The graphics are suitably cartoony. They’re not particularly impressive until you consider that there can be many, many burning zombies on screen at once and there isn’t ever a single stutter in the frame rate, which is quite impressive. There’s also loads and loads of blood, at the end of every level the ground is practically coated with the stuff, but it’s cartoony blood (think Fat Princess). Another nice touch is the death animation – zombie hands raise out of the ground beneath your corpse and drag you down into the soil.

There are different types of zombies, too. There’s the regular, slow zombie, then the exploder (it has a green police siren on it’s head and explodes when it gets close to you, shot, or set on fire), the dancers (they wear tutus and are quicker than the other zombies), as well as much bigger monsters who crop up in the challenge modes and in the later levels, who are much harder to kill and quite panic-enducing.

All this along with a local multiplayer mode, many levels, a decent sense of humour, numerous game modes and a challenge mode that will keep you, well, challenged, all keep you entertained. It’s a fun, if at times hard distraction that is surely worth the price.

8/10