Dead Pixels: The Perfect Thoughtless Zombie Shooter

Dead Pixel's isn't the most amazing or innovative  game of all time, but it's damn fun and it does perfectly what it set outs to do; namely, let you shoot zombies with a variety of weapons in a cute-yet-gory range of levels.

The basic game has you trying to make it a few dozen blocks to a Safezone, dodging and dealing death to hordes of zombies in your way. There are a bunch of weapons, at first following the usual handgun/shotgun/rifle set-up but there are far more interesting weapons at the higher difficulties and in the bonus campaigns.

You raid unlocked houses for weapons, ammo, and scrap, and buy new equipment and upgrades from stores that generally occur once or twice per level.

I honestly didn't expect to play this very long, but I ended up playing through to the end on my first time, and then coming back again the next day. Ammo is scarce, especially in the start, and the different weapon types use different kinds, so knowing when to use your handgun and when to use your shotgun becomes a constant juggling act. There isn't a lot of enemy variety but just enough to keep you on your toes, always trying to decide which gun would work best vs which ones you actually have ammo for. Zombies drop the coins you need to get more supplies, but they disappear pretty fast, so you often need to rush in and dance through the masses to get your reward for your kills; or carefully line them up and pull out your high-penetration rifle for a multiple head-shot.

It's this finely-tuned gameplay that makes Dead Pixels actually one of the better indie/small team zombie games I've ever played. Sure, there's a lot that could have been added to the game, but what is there is actually quite fun and scratches that arcade-zombie-shooter itch nicely.

Organ Trail: The Hellish Bleakness of Survival in a Zombie Apocalypse

My fingers are crossed. Our car battery broke down in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest, and no help is coming. A thief made off with our spare, and after waiting for hours and scavenging what scrap we could we've cobbled together enough to give us a sliver of a chance to fix it.

It's a chance we'll have to take. My best friend's been bitten, barely clinging to life, and if we don't get moving soon and find him some medkits he'll turn, and I'll have to shoot him before that can happen. We have a long way to go, but we've come too far and time is running out.

Organ Trail: The Director's Cut, made by game studio The Men Who Wear Many Hats, captures one aspect of the zombie apocalypse very well; namely, that it would be a hellish slog, full of endless tension and struggle, ending with certain violent death. (Or is that just life?)

It's the kind of game that you kind of dread playing, but then as soon as you're in it you can't escape. It moves slowly, and you hold your breathe every second waiting for the next horrible thing to happen.

A loving knock-off of Oregon Trail with Commodore 64 era graphics that are as perfect as they are crude and simple, Organ Trail really took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting much, but my first play-through lasted almost two hours of constant tension and unrelenting stress.

Gameplay, like in it's more educational predecessor, consists of naming a group of survivors and then slowly plodding along, from one side of the US to the other, encountering constant events and making sure to manage supplies and deal with illness. In Oregon Trail, you ford rivers and hunt game and trade supplies; In Organ Trail, you maneuver through zombie hordes and fight off bandits and biker gangs and try to keep your station wagon in working order.

It's relatively expansive; the range of weather events and upgrade options and encounters kept things fresh, and the shooting mechanics, which consist of you aiming in reverse, manage to keep excitement high as it's easy to fumble and miss when zombies (or zombie bears) are bearing down on you. I did wish for more variety in the scavenging missions, however; so much of the game depends on you scavenging often for money, food, and scrap, both to keep yourself alive and to trade, that it really starts to wear on you playing essentially the same mini-game over and over again. But in all honesty, it fits the theme; one of constant, unending, hellish struggle through a world gone mad. In that sense, I'd say it's one of the best and most interesting zombie games I've ever played.

Boxhead - Boxheaded Zombie Killing Madness

The Boxhead series is an old internet favorite, and the relatively newest iteration, Boxhead More Rooms, is so far the best of the bunch, taking the same addictive zombie killing madness and opening up a lot more room configurations and layouts to puzzle over.
It's a fairly standard top down shooter, but with a good variety of weapons and traps which force you to think strategically, or die.
Like all good zombie games, you most often get brought down by arrogance or a simple mistake- which leads to lots of replays to refine your strategy and prove yourself to...yourself. The online leaderboards also help.
You can play Boxhead More Rooms here.

Want to see more awesome online zombie games? Click here to see my list of the best.