A few stages later, the chainsaw wielding masked men in the garden maze are harder to take down than a bottle of Zima, but if I keep the rocket launcher I pick up a stage or two earlier, they're much easier to take care of. Made even worse, they'll spring out of nowhere and there's a lot of range on the axes they toss. Some enemies are just downright annoying, like in the grocery store, these speedy axe-throwing monster babies pick away at my health.

Standard zombies spring right back almost instantly, so I never felt a need to destroy them unless they got in my way with the uzi squirt guns. There's a lot of checks and balances with what you decide to place as an incentive. Healing items and accessories that come in handy like first aid kits, potions, even a vial that can temporarily make you invulnerable of turn you into a giant purple monster. There's a plethora of comical weapons you can pick up and use, like dishes, tomatoes, and soda cans that function as grenades, even melee items like weed whackers. With 48 stages in total, there's almost a coin-op arcade nature to it. Select Zeke or Julie and blast your way through constantly respawning zombie hordes while rescuing as many neighbors as possible to reveal an exit. Or for that matter, some of the humor you'd see in a lot of table-top board games such as Zombie High School, which is also very straightforward in nature and is pretty fleeting as far as replay value goes, but takes a lot of jabs at the popular horror movie trope Resident Evil redefined survival horror for console gaming, which saw most of its success on the PC throughout the 90's, games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors served as a prelude to tongue-in-cheek comedy horror games like Dead Rising and Lollipop Chainsaw. One of the stages is dedicated to Day of the Tentacle, a point-and-click LucasArts game that was for MS-DOS and came out that same year. The gameplay and mechanic were later utilized in another LucasArts title, Herc's Adventures, which I reviewed a year and a half ago.

By the time I started to give games a retrospective in the early 2000's, I learned it had quite a cult following and was more influential than I thought.ĭeveloped by LucasArts and published by Konami in 1993, Zombies Ate My Neighbors is an arcade style overhead run-n-gun action game that's both a product of its time and something that lead to the production of some of my more enjoyable games years later. Even some other games like The Chaos Project: Soldiers of Fortune, a top-down shooter from the Bitmap Brothers, I found myself playing more often.

I remember playing it a couple of times, my cousin had it and we rented it a few times, but when it came to co-op in our household, Jackal and Contra was more popular. Growing up, Zombies Ate My Neighbors wasn't really all that big a deal to me.

Zombies ate my friends hacked