Zombie Commander is a 2D pausable realtime strategy game. It's easiest to describe this as a ripoff of Plague Inc, but instead of a virus, you're controlling zombie hordes. Where it differs from Plague Inc is that you have some control over which cities get infected and where your zombie hordes will attack (once you've converted enough). The objective of course is to kill all the humans in the world, and it's no surprise that for some reason the developer thinks the entire world is mainland USA (Alaska and Hawaii don't even get a look in). Anyway that aside this is really a workable concept for what could be a great game, but it seems the zombies got to the parts of the developers brain that are related to high quality modern video game technical implementations, so the resulting game is a train wreck, and the train was carrying dumpster fires.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The game doesn't correctly account for modern PC displays, UI scaling isn't handled correctly. As a result of this unfortunate decision, text and UI elements don't display at a reasonable size, it's too small to be legible on most modern gaming PCs, and there's no in-game controls or options to correct this. This can render the game unplayable for many.
The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does. And we all know, Steam isn't here to compete with Chrome and Firefox. If the game can be done in a web browser, it's just not rich or compelling enough to appeal to serious gamers on PC.
Another problem here is that you can't alt+tab out of the game properly, another shortcoming that should have been picked up with even a basic amount of software testing. This is extremely frustrating in the modern era of gaming and it's a shortcoming that gamers are unlikely to accept. The game audio keeps playing and the game process keeps running, but the game window disappears and you can't re-enter it. Basic testing is vital if any game is going to succeed in the vast ocean of games available on Steam.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. That's right, only 3. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is to be expected. Gamers just didn't take this low quality game seriously, and for good reason.
Zombie Commander is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
