Zombie Cannon Carnage

• iPhone

by Zach Starr on 03.04.10

Apps, apps, and more apps. What do you download? What do you spend your hard-earned money on? Once again, I will selflessly do the testing for you and maybe save you some time and cash. Zombie Cannon Carnage is one of the latest games from Freeverse; although, calling this a game may be a bit of a stretch.

In Zombie Cannon Carnage, the object is to blast a zombie out of a huge cannon and amass as much damage as “humanly” possible. While flying through the air, you can gain more points by ramming into score multipliers. Causing enough chaos will allow you to self-destruct and, you guessed it, destroy even more stuff. By now, you’re probably getting the general theme of this app. Sadly, that’s really all there is to it: three rounds of shooting corpses from cannons. In between rounds, you can purchase power-ups to upgrade your cannon, buy extra explosives, etc. The problem is, that’s the whole “game.” Adjust the tilt of the cannon, press the fire button, and thrust your zombie farther using a fuel gauge; that’s it. Playing more will unlock new characters, and with each new character, the look of the cityscape changes slightly, but this is nothing that will make you want to keep coming back for more.

Graphically, there is not much to look at. Zombie Cannon Carnage is a 2-D game with small sprites. The zombies have a kind of rag-doll physics, which is somewhat amusing. The cutscenes and menus have a nice gritty look to them, and the character design, although a bit cliché, is pretty good.

There is no music in Zombie Cannon Carnage, only ambient noise that sounds like a city in chaos. The sound effects of smacking into things and explosions are OK, but nothing stands out.

Most of what this app has to offer can be experienced within the first five minutes of gameplay. Uploading your high score to compete against other players adds a slight bit of replay value, but ultimately, there is not enough here to justify a purchase. I also had problems with Zombie Cannon Carnage frequently freezing and crashing, even after powering off/on, deleting the app, and reinstalling it. Generally, Freeverse puts out some pretty solid games, but this one falls short — even at the budget price of $0.99. I really hope this whole cashing in on zombies craze dies soon ... and that it doesn’t come back to life.