Review: Dead Block

A rocking zombie apocalypse

What do you get when you combine a construction worker, a boy scout and a police woman, rock’n’roll  and meat eating zombies? A mediocre game, which could have been much more.

Jack Foster: Construction worker who is good with the hammer. Also good to get blood on himself.

We notice already in the intro that this game is trying to be a black comedy. It works well in the introduction to the levels, but aside from that, this game is not funny, but instead frustrating at times. The problem in this game is that it’s either too easy or too hard.

You play as three different characters throughout the game and every one of them has their own special skills. You start off slow as we find our first hero, Jack Foster, trapped in a building and with zombies all over. The basic tactic of this game when entering a new room is: trap all doors and windows and start smashing up everything you see, to find useful things to use against the living dead. You can give them meat or turn on the jukebox to take them out easier. If you get in a fight with a zombie, the health bar soon starts to go down, so avoid this. If you get in a fight with twenty zombies, run!

Guitar Hero: This concert was sold out...

The Kid: Mike Bacon is one of the other playable characters. He shouldn't have been.

What you need to find in most levels is an amplifier and a guitar so you can play rock’n’roll for the zombies in the end. The zombies are allergic to rock music and will die if they hear it. This ending scene features a cool little guitar hero mini game, where you actually play the guitar. That was maybe the most interesting thing in the whole game. It gets repetitive and boring when you will do the same things again and again. You can also set up traps for the zombies, but this is just fun until you have done all the things. Someone will maybe find some fun in this game, but the most will have problems with the repetation of things to do.

What now, Mikey?: That's a part of being in a zombie game.

Gamescore

Dead Block (2011)

Graphics:  Good graphics and details on the main characters, but on the rest of the crew(zombies), it’s pretty straight forward. The details could also have been much better on objects. 6/10

Audio: You know what you go in to when entering the main menus. Good old rock’n’roll music starts to play and keeps on going till the end of the game. The main voice during the intro videos does his job in the start, but gets repetitive also. 6/10

Gameplay: Starts great with puzzles where you have to block windows, doors and set up traps to live on. This gets boring after a couple of levels. When not doing this it’s not much you can do, except for playing the guitar at the end of levels. Could have been much better with more opportunities to choose from. 3/10

Controls: Works great from what i have experienced. Move the character with your keyboard and point, right or left click to smash things up. The guitar mini-games are played with the keyboard and is pretty simple compared to guitar hero. 8/10

Overall Score: Dead Block is a funny game at times and that’s when it is at its best. Setting traps, blocking doors and playing the guitar is fun for a while, but something more should have been added here. It’s far away from the worst I’ve played of zombie games and my advice is to try it out. Too much of the same when getting far in the game, destroys the gaming experience.6/10