Zombie Nation (1990)

Beat on Hard. Based on the title and premise of fighting zombies as a samurai, I expected it to be a side scrolling action platformer or simpler version of Zombies Ate my Neighbors. I was very surprised when it turned out to be a weird hybrid of Rampage and shoot em up where you are a giant flying head shooting down choppers, destroying buildings and eating people? The plot and gameplay did not match at all, and the entire game made very little sense. Despite that it was reasonably fun as a simple shooter with destruction. The most difficult part was the lightning beams that blocked passage and did massive damage. It took me a few deaths to figure that out. Each stage had a different variation of the lightning, such as smoke stacks and giant snakes swimming up water falls. Those water falls were annoying because they pushed me to the bottom and made it nearly impossible to gain any altitude. Sometimes I had to destroy terrain to create alternate routes, and others it was just about timing. I greatly disliked the lame color scheme, with head, debris from destroying stuff, and both yours and enemy projectiles all being the same color. It made it more difficult than necessary to see enemy shots. The head shot a basic ball straight ahead that seemed to home towards enemies, and a fire bolt that dropped with gravity to hit lower enemies. There were no other weapons or power ups of any kind other than gaining health for killing stuff, which was very needed due to no life system.

The enemies varied from recognizable military vehicles and soldiers to weird shapes that I can only assume were robots or aliens, giant animals and sand monsters. There were even some blue giant heads that looked just like the player. The 1st boss was the statue of liberty, which was way larger than it should have been. Then a colossus sized ripped old man throwing axes (wtf), then a massive underground base on wheels, then 4 worm things. The final boss was a giant green alien laying down asleep while a ring of satellites orbited around him. Such a weird game but it was ok for a NES shoot em up. More fun than Rampage at least.

6.0/10

(This is the 34th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Zombie Nation, released initially on December 14th 1990 for the NES, is one of the weirdest shoot 'em ups you will play in your life time, because the character you play is the severed head of a samurai traveling to the USA to stop a meteor called "Darc Seed" from destroying the USA completely. The reason why he does that is because Darc Seed has the ability to control a powerful samurai sword.

So you control this severed head called Namakubi and vomit projectiles on jets, buildings, turrets, people, whatever gets in your way. Yes, really. It's such a weird premise but actually not a turn-off on its own.

What was actually the bigger turn-off for me here was that, all told, the gameplay is just not that fun and game doesn't impress in any area apart from its weirdness. The music is alright, the graphics meh and the level design essentially very average. You don't really get to find any fun new abilities or power ups, there are no secrets to uncover and the enemy variety is low. You pretty much do the same thing over and over again in each level with very limited options. To top it off, the later levels include so many projectiles on the screen at once that the game can't handle it and starts lagging.

OVERALL

Suffice to say, this game is not worthy of a suggestion if you're looking for a fun game. It might be worth checking out if you want to take a look at a very weird game at least. Despite my opinion, I think it's funny and worth a mention that the damn "St. Petersburg Times" (now Tampa Bay Times) ranked Zombie Nation tied for 10th among the best games ever list in 1992. That's some weird taste they got over there.