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 isnt fun whatsoever

- Upgrade system is lame

- $10? Are you kidding me?

Dont play this game. 

The Long

Bloody hell indie developers, its 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. Its 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 youll 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 couldnt stay consistent. Brilliant. 

This is the worst game Ive played in a long while. 

The second thing youll notice is how ugly it is. Its 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! Dont 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 thats good I guess) you get to the real turd at the core of this game: the gameplay. Its 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 dont 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 its a two-clip gun. Two. Clip. With like 20 total. So you get two shots while running around backwards until you die. Bonus? It isnt even as good as the assault rifle. Its 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 cant really control your mouse adequately. In addition, since it uses the WASD keys to move, you cant 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 doesnt tell you where to go, and loves putting foreground objects right in your view. Ill 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 Ill be a snack. Awesome. 

Thats 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 wouldnt pay anything for it. In fact, the fact I got it in an indie bundle and now its permanently tied to my Steam account offends me. I want it off, forever. No, I didnt 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 doesnt even deserve that.

Dead Horde is the cheapest of the cheap when it comes to indie games, and it cant even do the most basic things right. Dont encourage this kind of behavior. Avoid at all costs.

Zero out of five stars. 

And stay down!