Dead Horde

The Short

Pros

- Has zombies in it

- You can shoot them for points and money

Cons

- Framerate and animations are horrible

- Graphics look bland and uninspired

- Lighting is poor

- Game isn't fun whatsoever

- Upgrade system is lame

- $10? Are you kidding me?

Don't play this game. 

The Long

Bloody hell indie developers, it's time to get away from two things: Dual-stick shooters and zombies. Ok, three things: add tower defense games to that list. Unless you are clever like the Unstoppable Gorg guys. But seriously...no more zombies, no more dual-stick shooters. It's like all anybody ever makes these days.

If you need an example of one that is redundant but still enjoyable, Zombie Shooter is worth your time. If you want to scrape the very bottom of the barrel in terms of useless garbage, we have Dead Horde here that requires your attention. 

The loading screens are absurdly long. 

Everything about Dead Horde is a misstep, with somethings not just misstepping but straight up falling over. The first thing you'll notice is that it plays in a window, at 1080x720. Which is fine, as I usually prefer these types of games in windows, but your mouse cursor is moving...slowly? Then you get into the game and...is the framerate really chugging? Or are the animations this bad?

In an attempt to decipher this mystery, I dropped it to the lowest resolution and full screened it (which takes less resources) just to see if it was true. My conclusion? Even on my Mac Mini with 8 GB ram (yes, I game on a dual-booted Mac, hush) the animations were bad AND the framerate couldn't stay consistent. Brilliant. 

This is the worst game I've played in a long while. 

The second thing you'll notice is how ugly it is. It's a bland, generic, gray n' brown affair, with the ruins of civilization all set in a constant darkness with nothing interesting to break it up. The zombies look as boring as they come, with all of them in the first level looking exactly the same, but luckily in stage two they get one new variant! Don't overwork yourselves, guys, you might need to save your pallet-swapped enemies for later levels!

So after watching these awful abominations run towards you (yes, they run, not shuffle, so that's good I guess) you get to the real turd at the core of this game: the gameplay. It's a dual-stick shooter (as you probably guessed) where the mouse aims and keyboard moves. But shooting zombies is tedious. You have one unlimited machine gun (as your only weapon until you buy more), and no melee. So you essentially run backwards in circles holding your mouse down as he fires his (really small) clip into them, reloads, and keeps firing. More and more zombies pile on and you just keep backing up in circles, like doing some sort of weird dance. Eventually (after way too long) they all die and you move on. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you have this entire game. Not kidding.

It has an upgrade system. It also sucks. 

You can bump your guns up but the upgrades are expensive and don't do much difference after getting them. Buying new guns is also stupid. Say I bought that Shotgun for 15k. It comes with no ammo. So I buy ammo for $1500. Now I find out it's a two-clip gun. Two. Clip. With like 20 total. So you get two shots while running around backwards until you die. Bonus? It isn't even as good as the assault rifle. It's like this whole upgrade system is a joke.

The controls are also awful, even for something that has been done a trillion times. Because of the dodgy framerate, you can't really control your mouse adequately. In addition, since it uses the WASD keys to move, you can't move diagonally with any precision. And then the game requires you to move diagonally with precision on the first level. Which meant I fell off a stupid platform a lot.

It also doesn't tell you where to go, and loves putting foreground objects right in your view. I'll be fighting a zombie "horde" (read: like nine) and be circling around in my stupid little bullet shooting dance, and suddenly a tree will block my view and I'll be a snack. Awesome. 

That's some quality lighting. 

I could say more, but I feel it would be unnecessary. This game goes for the absolutely-not-worth-it price of $10 on Steam. I wouldn't pay anything for it. In fact, the fact I got it in an indie bundle and now it's permanently tied to my Steam account offends me. I want it off, forever. No, I didn't beat it; I only played it for 35 minutes. You should feel lucky I re-installed it after deleting it to get these awful screenshots, because it doesn't even deserve that.

Dead Horde is the cheapest of the cheap when it comes to indie games, and it can't even do the most basic things right. Don't encourage this kind of behavior. Avoid at all costs.

Zero out of five stars. 

And stay down!