Review: The Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys! (NDS)

Teenage Zombies is a simplistic DS platformer, where the titular trio of zombies have been awakened by an invasion of alien brains, and since they are the only ‘humans’ who are immune to the alien’s mind controlling shenanigans, they are the last hope for survival. Good thing the planet wasn’t invaded by alien livers or we’d be in real trouble.

The three zombies all have their own abilities, the only female zombie, “Lefty” Lopez, is great for scaling high ledges with her extendable arm, while he tubby friend “Fins” has three tentacles growing from his back for some reason, allowing him to climb walls. Meanwhile, “Half-Pipe” is missing everything from below his waste but gets around on his skateboard meaning he’s able to pass through narrow gaps and jump over ramps.

As you can probably tell by now, this game is far from serious. The graphics look like a Saturday morning cartoon, and stories are told in comic book format. It also tries to be funny, but most of the jokes fall flat due to rather hackneyed writing. Still, not every game can be as funny as Phoenix Wright. The visuals would be better if the animation matched the cartoon-esque quality of the graphics, but sadly most are rather stiff, though that’s somewhat appropriate in a game about shambling corpses. Some run smoothly like when Fins eats the brains of enemies (or rather, the enemy brains) to regain health, but by comparison, Lefty’s is stiff with far fewer frames.

There is more consistency with the gameplay, as it’s all quite simple. While the game does have you running around killing enemies while trying to get to the end of the level. The majority is made up of swapping between your zombies and using their abilities to solve the puzzles. All of which involve getting a zombie specific power up so they can pass through a wall, fall down a hole without hurting themselves, or traverse some terrain. Oh sure, sometimes there’s some enemies to circumvent or a specific type of enemy to defeat, but that’s all there is to it at the end of the day. The only other aspect to the game there is to comment on are the mini-games that turn up every now and then, such as collecting a zombies dismembered corpse and assembling him again buy dragging the various parts on to the torso, or Half-Pipe’s half-pipe, which has the undead skater performing stunts to kill alien brains for no other reason than to extend the games lifespan.

Moving on, there’s nothing else to really comment on with the game aside from the audio. The zombies are mostly silent apart from the odd grunt when taking damage or trying to pick up a power-up they can’t use and enemies only make a sound when they fire or meet a terrible end. The game's music fares better, with each world having it's own but in some cases quite similar.

Teenage zombies isn’t a terrible game, it’s just lazy. There’s barely anything to it, and what does exist on the DS cart isn’t spectacular. It’s almost as if the developers phoned in most of the team whilst working on something more important, in the full knowledge that this game wasn’t going to set the world alight. A gaming non-event if there ever was one.

Rating: 4 / 10

Words by Garry Webber