Zombie Tsunami

Most games shaped like this put you in front of the danger. This one hands you the danger instead.

Being the horde rather than the victim

One zombie shuffles down the street, bites a commuter, and now there are two of you, then twelve, then a screaming green wall filling half the screen. It is a daft game and it knows it, which makes it easy to recommend to younger players and to anyone who wants something silly for a few minutes. Growing a crowd is funnier and easier to read than protecting one character, and losing a few stragglers to a hole in the road costs you numbers rather than the whole attempt.

Eating your way down the street

A single tap makes the mob jump, and everything else follows from how big the mob has become. A large crowd smashes through a bus that would have stopped a small one. Cars, gaps and helicopters pick away at the edges, and the run only ends when the last zombie goes, which gives a bad stretch a real chance to recover. The power-ups are where the personality lives: the right token turns your whole crowd into a giant robot, or a dragon, or a ball of zombies flattening the street, and the change is drastic enough to reset the feel of a run instead of stacking another multiplier on it.

When the novelty thins

The shortfall is that the joke is finite. Once you have seen every transformation and cleared the early mission tiers, nothing new arrives, and what is left is repeating runs you have already found funny in order to pay upgrade costs that climb faster than the coins do. A game carried by surprise cannot survive running out of surprises, and this one runs out in a fortnight. The advert timing, usually landing exactly as you reach for retry, makes those later runs feel longer than they are.

For a free arcade game built around a single joke, it holds up remarkably well. Play until you have turned your crowd into a dragon at least once, and keep it for the odd spare minute rather than expecting it to fill an evening.