Soup du jour. Hot hors d’oeuvres. Why, we only live to eat brains!
Starting up twin-stick shooter Zombie Soup, I was immediately hit with a sense of nostalgia, despite this being a new game by a newer developer I wasn’t previously aware of. This game evokes a style and nostalgia for early 2000s 3D cartoons, reminiscent of the somewhat off putting style of shows like Jimmy Neutron, where the models aren’t really appealing but that contributes to the overall feel. Zombie Soup feels kind of like that early 3D animation: it has charm and parts of it are compelling, but ultimately it’s a bit rough around the edges.
Zombie Soup has a fairly straightforward premise. You play as Ricky, a backpacker who gets caught up in a zombie infestation and needs to save the girl. It’s pretty bare bones as far as stories go, and while there are some funny moments, a lot of the humor seems to get lost in this game. Certain plot beats fall far flatter than they ought to, as well. Early on, you run into a skeleton known as MC Skull, who then travels with you as a skull and provides the back and forth with Ricky. It feels pretty clear that AeonSparks Interactive wanted to make MC Skull a kind of mascot but nothing he says is particularly funny or stands out.
The gameplay is very solid: it’s an isometric twin-stick shooter with a variety of weapon classes to play around with. The main classes are pretty standard shooter fare, with pistols, shotguns and sniper rifles among the weapon types, but there are also special weapons you can find with fun effects and limited ammo. My personal favorite was the Basezooka, which lobs a volley of baseballs that bounce around your environment, but I had fun with most of the arsenal. There’s no consistent way to get these weapons so they’re less of a strategy and more of a novelty, but they do a good job of shaking things up and making the moment to moment gameplay more fun.
The actual gameplay involves moving through several different environments (a club, a hospital, a cemetery, etc.) while looking for the next boss to defeat so that you can move forward. Occasionally there are side missions, like finding an item for someone else, but they’re mostly backtracking through previous areas. The layout of these vary from either unobtrusive to annoying, but are for the most part solid. There seems to be very little incentive to fight the average mob of zombies, unless you’re hunting for a particular special weapon or need the currency for upgrades (which I rarely didn’t have enough of) so at a certain point I started dodging enemies rather than fighting my way through them. I just wish there was maybe more incentive to fighting the average zombies. The upgrade system is very basic (a handful of tiers you can choose one perk from) so maybe supplementing or augmenting that could be a way to make the grind feel worth it. There are some challenges you can approach, such as replaying boss fights with different items and timed challenges to get different weapons, but nothing in particular that personally interested me to keep playing beyond the 10 or so hour runtime.
Part of the reason I suggest tweaking the upgrade system is that Zombie Soup gets hard, fast. The difficulty curve shoots straight up at the third major boss, which feels like it comes out of nowhere. After that, I definitely had to take a few tries to defeat any of the bosses, once I got the timing down. While there are certain aspects of the mechanics I found frustrating, such as how slowly the stamina meter recharged and how unforgiving the invincibility frames could be, I loved that feeling of satisfaction when taking down a particularly tricky boss. I think your enjoyment of Zombie Soup is going to be based completely on how you feel with difficult encounters like this.
Unfortunately, the difficulty spike in boss fights leads to more frustration with certain aspects of Zombie Soup. Occasionally there are some glitches, and while they’re rare they can be quite annoying. I was particularly frustrated by a fight against two bosses at the same time where one somehow despawned mid-fight, which forced me to reload even though that had been my best attempt so far. Another glitch was in the pre-fight cutscene, which showed Ricky running into a door and not through it for several seconds before loading in the fight. Boss fights with any sort of animated cutscene can be skipped but if it’s done in the game engine, it can’t be skipped, which makes trying a difficult encounter over and over even more grating. The music for Zombie Soup is decent, but each boss fight has the same music which got monotonous fast with how repetitive it could be.
Zombie Soup is a flawed but interesting twin-stick shooter. I certainly enjoyed my time with it but there were a number of frustrations that made it hard to be an instant recommendation. It doesn’t add anything particularly new to the genre while also not being polished enough to perfect the genre. That said, it’s a solid game that makes me want to see more from this studio, and one I would recommend to fans of these shooters who want that welcome satisfaction of triumphing over a stiff challenge.
