AFD is a zombie survival shooter featuring some of the best animation and atmosphere I’ve seen in an iPhone game. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a stunted review as I can’t really get the game to run reliably on my iPhone without crashing. I’ve got one jailbreak program (qsms) running in the background, but this hasn’t stopped me from playing other games without crashing. Rebooting my iPhone doesn’t seem to help much either, which is a shame since AFD actually features some great gory zombie shooting action.
You play as Agent Jessica (her last name is classified) and you’ve got to fight a zombie army off while looking for Dr. Anderson. I won’t explain much more of the story because it really doesn’t matter — we’re here to brain the mindless dead.
Night Time — combat
You start the game off in a convenient store at night, and as far as I know this is where you’re going to be doing all of your fighting. You fight off a wave of zombies for about two minutes and keep them from getting through your barricade (your HP, basically). If they get through, you die a very poorly animated death, but you do have the option of continuing (I don’t see a mention of lives, though.
You can fight off the horde with your melee attack (shake the iPhone) or by tapping on-screen and shooting them with one of four weapons (pistol/revolver/SMG/shotgun). I’ve tried all the weapons except for the shotgun, and they all look, sound, and feel great to use. Each weapon has a recoil animation for your character as well as a reload animation, and the zombies actually reel in pain when you shoot them (not completely brain dead, I guess). I saw three types of zombies in my time with the game: normal zombies (nombies), tough zombies (tombies), and fast zombies (fast zombies).
The gameplay is a real blast, as you have to keep moving your position up and down the screen to line up your shots, but you can’t move while shooting. The devs included locational damage, so a headshot is different from a body shot.
You’ve also got limited ammo for every weapon but the pistol, and ammo carries across levels, so you’ve got to conserve if you want to last more than one level. This is one of the few games where the action has really kept me playing for over an hour. Shooting zombies is fun and therapeutic.
Day time — back to the mission
Once you’ve cleared a zombie wave time will shift to day and you’ll be presented with a small map of the town. You’ve got three action points (AP) available to you, and you use these AP to visit buildings. This is another balancing mini game, as you have to choose between searching for Dr. Anderson, visiting the weapons shop, or repairing your barricade. Once you’ve made your choice, you can move onto the next round and it’ll be night time again.
Atmosphere
This isn’t going to scare you like Resident Evil does. There will be no zombies bursting through doorways or out of the ceiling, but you will see wave after wave of undead who want you to join their ranks. It’s terrifying in much the same way as a wave of cockroaches clicking and icky-ing their way toward you. The sounds of the guns and the gore of landing a headshot add a lot to the immersion factor. All of the animations is great, actually, with one notable exception: your death. When you die a zombie somehow just teleports across the barrier and stands in the same spot as Jessica and actually clips into her model. Considering how well everything else is presented here, as well as the fact that it’s a zombie game, you’d think your death would be more…well, epic. Or at the very least, animated.
Conclusion
If you like zombies, shooting zombies, or being stuck in a convenient store and fighting for your life against zombies, then you’d probably be right at home with AFD. Unfortunately, until they patch the game (currently 1.0), I can’t really recommend it to anyone. I think my iPhone is pretty darn stable and fast — I like to keep it that way for reviews — so the fact that I have so much trouble just running the game is a bad sign. I really hope the devs take steps to patch things up really soon.
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In any case, if you’d like to try your luck with AFD you can currently buy it for $0.99 on the App Store.
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