Early Access Review: Zombie Party

Zombie Party is an indie rogue-lite game developed by Peach Pie Studios and is currently in early-access alpha stages on Steam.

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Premise:

Blast, shoot, and burn everything in your path!

Obtain a large variety of weapons and upgrades to maximize your weapon efficiency, customize your destruction, and survive the never-ending onslaught of enemies!

Every time you die, it only means you will come back more powerful than before!

Visuals:

DA BOSS!

Kinda meh visuals.  Not all that interesting, but the character and object sprites have a certain amount of appeal to them.

Backgrounds are pretty bland too.

Also, very often you will lose track of your cursor in the hectic battles.  This often costs you a hit or it will end a crazy good combo.

Menus/Interface:

Decent menu system, but it has some issues.

Weapon select screens were hard to understand at first.

Also, when selecting a character after a previous death, it does not save your weapon presets for characters, so you must go through the cumbersome weapon select menus to re-select your weapons every match.

Long stat screens after a match should be skippable.  It takes way too long to see all your stats after a game.

In-game interface is well laid out and informative.  I like the little radar that shows you where enemies are.

Gameplay:

Gameplay is pretty fast-paced.  You are constantly dodging enemies and their ranged attacks.

This being said, oftentimes it seems unfair the amount of junk the game throws at you.  This is especially evident on the Disco level where there are spinning blades of death all over, in addition to unfair amounts of projectiles flying at you from every direction.  On top of this, enemies will often spawn directly in front of or on top of your character, leaving you no choice but to take a hit.  This game has a lot of unfair damage, especially during boss fights which all use the generic "Hey, Imma shoot in a circle now, and there is nothing you can do about it!" attack pattern.

There are multiple game-types, but they are all relatively similar, so I don't think I need to delve into that.

There are numerous weapon types with unique weapon effects.  Your standard weapons can all have special attack modifiers applied to them, allowing you to customize them even more to your liking.

My personal favorite is customizing the pistols with a spread shot and two split shots, as seen below:

Take a look at that freaking spread!

All those bullets came from a single shot.  The mods are so much fun to fiddle with, and are definitely the best part of the game.

Also, with every death you will collect more gold to level up your character's base stats and buy new default equipment.  Thus, with every death you grow more powerful.

There is also a multiplayer mode which I had...  Attempted to use.  By which I mean I played for 30 seconds and it was lagging so bad that I had to quit.  I can't wait to see what multiplayer has to offer once they get that all figured out.

Controls:

Reasonably simple controls.  Point and click to shoot, right click for magic, W,A,S,D to move, and space to jump.

It works well, so there isn't much more to say about it!  Just don't lose your cursor in the madness!

Summary:

A fun little game.  Weapons and weapon mods are a blast to use!  (Pun intended)

There is also a leaderboard for people who care about that kind of thing.

Unfair difficulty can put a damper on things, but its not too bad.

Early access score:  7.5 / 10

What do you think?  Do you agree?  Let me know what you think in the comments section below!  If you want to try out the game, here is a link to the Steam page:  Zombie Party