After beating Zombie Shooter 1, I decided to pop in Zombie Shooter 2 to see how Sigma Team improved their game over the next two years. The production budget seemed to be slightly higher at first look. The story tried to flesh itself out a bit, but it turns out to be nearly the same, but with the addition of some one-dimensional voice acting. The controls went from an eight directional shooter to 360 degree style controls, but the questionable camera that comes with it. As you turn your character with the mouse, the camera adjusts in an awkward fashion that will, overtime, give the player a headache after a couple of hours.
Another change is the direction of the art style in the game, which went from a cartoon colorful aesthetic, to one with a grainy black and white, old movie-style feel. Nothing really big to complain about here, since they give you the option to turn off the grain effect, but I personally enjoyed the previous game’s art style more.
One of the biggest turnoffs that erupted from this sequel is how the weapon damage scales. In Zombie Shooter 1, each weapon was strong enough to take on a horde of zombies, and you never felt powerless. In Zombie Shooter 2, the weapons scale in a way that makes most of them completely useless. I could shoot a brute enemy for a minute and it will seem as if he took no damage, but if I pull out a machine gun, the same guy could go down in fifteen seconds. This brings up another problem: the zombies in this sequel take way too long to kill, resulting in you being in constant danger of running out of ammo, since the ammo that drops are usually the ones you can never use. So if your only useful weapon runs out of ammo during a mission, you’re pretty much SOL since your other two weapons have no chance of killing large enemies. The game seemed like it was designed to replay earlier levels in order to level up your weapon damage higher, but the game gave me no desire to do this.
Zombie Shooter 2 also had a good chance of locking up for a few seconds during the campaign. Lowering the graphics settings did not diminish this glitch. It may only happen on specific computers, but it is still worth noting.
So after playing through Zombie Shooter 2, it seemed like a huge step back from the first Zombie Shooter. The problems that plaque this sequel leave me little incentive to recommend this game to anyone. So if any of these games peak your interest in the slightest, spending a couple of bucks on the first game, while ignoring the second, is not out of the question.