You Are Legend In Overlive [Review]

This just in: Someone has made a game about zombies.

You probably weren’t expecting that, huh? A zombie game? It’s crazy on the face of it.

Now, look: I hate zombies as much as the next person. Maybe a bit more, even. Stupid shambling a****les. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend all of my gaming time killing them. I have a lot of other things to pretend to kill, like Nazis and Pokémon. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t immediately sold on Overlive, a new undead-themed gamebook with role-playing-game elements, even though it’s hard to go wrong with me once you start offering choices and stats.

Once I started playing it, though, Overlive won me over.

Here’s the situation: You wake up in your apartment with no real recollection of what’s going on until you remember that oh, yeah, the world has ended and zombies are everywhere. You have 180 days to escape from the city before something very bad happens to it, and you have a lot of work to do before then.

You’ll spend most of your time in Overlive exploring. You do this by going to a location and clicking on the dozens of events available and seeing what happens. Sometimes, you find supplies, and sometimes, you find zombies. Eventually, you’ll unlock a new location to explore, and the process starts over.

The sheer number of things to click on in any given location can be intimidating.

Fighting zombies is a matter of swiping (melee attacks) and tapping (ranged attacks) to defeat your assailant before they chomp your life away and force your retreat. It’s a little basic and simple, but a more complicated combat system would take away from the real point of the game, which is finding a way out.

The sheer number of things to click on in any given location can be intimidating, but it goes quickly once you’re doing it. And it shouldn’t be interesting, but the tension the game inspires with its uncertainty about what you’re going to find and whether you’ll succeed in its invisible dice rolls is impressive.

I don’t have enough words left to describe how cool this thing is, but it’s well worth checking out, especially if you don’t think the zombie subgenre has anything new to offer.

Game Name: : Overlive The Good: Simple but deep gameplay with a lot of tension; multiple endings and ways to play; plus, it’s a zombie game that isn’t completely shoot-’em-in-the-head boring. The Bad: The depth and exploration doesn’t quite lend itself well to short bursts of gameplay. The Verdict: It’s a clever and unique zombie-apocalypse experience that offers a ton of content and replay value for your two bucks. Buy from: App Store – Overlive – FireRabbit

[rating=game5]