Zombie Derby 2 is a driving and shooting action game. In it, you will upgrade and modify your vehicle to mow down the zombie hordes as you traverse the apocalyptic wasteland in search of safety.
The countless undead hordes will try to mow you down, and you have to be tough to survive against them!
While it is a driving game, this title is played in a side scrolling manner. Still, all the elements are realized like 3D games. As you gather and upgrade the different cars, you can go to your garage and admire your collection. The quality of the car models is truly something else, with spectacle coming before realism. You can even customize their cosmetic appearance, adding stickers and changing colors.
The game might be post apocalyptic, yet it maintains a cheery mood all throughout. The game is played for fun, after all. All zombies explode in an exaggerated manner, no matter how you slay them, and when you get multiple in a row there is a disembodied voice telling you how cool you are. It can be very cathartic to mow down wave after wave by just moving forward.
The controls are simple yet deceptively complicated. You press the W key to go forward, which uses gas. You want to use as little gas as possible in order to complete the level, therefore you need to pay attention to when your car is airborne, since if you keep hitting the pedal you will be spending gas when you do not want to.
Same thing happens with the nitro boost, which you activate with the shift key. The nitro boost is specifically meant for ramps, but it is a good fuel substitute for when you are running out of it, and you are about to make it to the finish line.
Keep in mind, however, that if you do not have enough boost for the ramps, you might just die, since they let you jump over pits and mines.
The final resource you need to keep an eye on is bullets. Sure, you can mow down zombies with your machine gun, but that is what your car is for. You are meant to shoot certain obstacles, some of which can instantly kill you, others that just slow you down.
The main point of the game, other than completing the stages, is to make money. You get it as rewards for doing things in stages, mainly killing and destroying objects. You then spend that money to buy cars and upgrade them.
Cars can be upgraded in five ways. Fuel and Nitro are self explanatory, as are Bullets. They give you more of that given resource, and except for Fuel, you do not have access to that mechanic without buying at least the first level per car. Wheel makes you go faster up ramps, and the Bumper gives the car a sort of melee weapon to instantly destroy zombies and boxes. This last one is the only upgrade with a single level each time.
New cars are unlocked as you beat levels, and you will end up buying them all whether you like it or not. You see, each car has a hard cap on every resource it can use. For beating the first stage only, you would have to nearly fully upgrade the first car that is given to you. Then, for the second level, that car simply can not beat it. It will not have enough fuel.
What you need to do then is buy the next car, and improve it from scratch until it is able to beat that stage, rinse and repeat.
This is a sort of built in mode of replayability, since while you are gathering money to beat a given stage you can go around and try other levels with other cars. You could even try some of the other modes, like ghost or extreme. You could even try your luck at a random level; keep in mind that these levels might end up being impossible to beat.
Zombie Derby 2 is an unexpectedly relaxing title. While it is fun to mow down the hordes of undead, it is also entertaining from a car management point of view.
The gameplay simply does not get old, and collecting the different cars is great fun.
If you enjoy these free games, you will love this list of our 10 Best Shooting Games!