Zombie Driver HD | a Review
originally published on 11/05/2026;
Hello everyone, I am the suspiciously green G.E.M.Simov, an undead who still retains its humanity, and I’m here to tell you about a little game by Exor Studios - “Zombie Driver HD”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Zombie Driver HD is a top-down car game. The Player controls a vehicle (typically a car, but could be a bus, a van, a truck or a tank), with the WASD keys, and navigates a vast city as though they were holding a toy car and moving it over one of those street-based carpets or doormats that might live rent-free in people’s heads.
The way movement works is that the car goes either forward, via W, or backwards, via S, and with the A and D keys the Player can steer it. Additionally, the Player also gets access to a speed boost, usable by clicking and holding the Right Mouse Button (RMB), and weapons, usable by clicking and holding the Left Mouse Button (LMB) down.
The game is fabled to also allow for braking, via the Spacebar, but it never felt as though it worked (most likely due to improper, or even bad, feedback).
With that control scheme, the Player drives their car through the city’s streets, sporting a health bar, which can be depleted by taking damage (damage is caused by zombies), with a failure (of some variety) occurring when it is completely depleted. It can also be replenished by driving through an object that can be found while driving around. The Player’s car also features a boost bar, which can be depleted by boosting (holding down the RMB), which increases the car’s speed and spews very weak flames from the rear (can act as an ineffective weapon); the boost bar replenishes on its own, while not boosting, but quite slowly - with the alternative being to drive through a particular object (found while driving) which replenishes all of the car’s boost bar.
Lastly, the car has its ammo. The ammo does not appear as a bar, rather as a number, indicating how many times the Player can fire the weapon in question. Some have a smaller number, like 8, while others have a larger number, like 300. The higher the number, the lower the amount of damage done per bit of ammo consumed. There are four types of ammo, with each being relegated to its respective weapon, and only one type of ammo can be carried at a time. Additionally, ammo can not exceed a certain number, though it can be replenished by driving over certain objects, which indicates that it works on a bar-based system, even though it is not presented as such.
The four weapons that the Player has access to are:
the rail-gun, which fires a beam (or two) that reaches a certain point and does damage to everything between the car and the point at which the beam ends (though it does not originate from the tip of the car, rather from one [or both] sides of it, creating a bit of unreliability and a necessity for more peculiar aiming);
the rockets launcher/rocket, which fires a rocket (or two rockets) that explodes upon colliding with an enemy, doing large damage in an area around the point of impact. Similar to the rail-gun, in the sense that it is fired from the side of the car (or both), it does not necessitate as much precision, because it is an exploding rocket. However, there are instances when a target can wind up positioned in such a way that, even when a rocket is fired from both sides of the car, they whizz past the enemy, who is squeezed like a hotdog in between the buns;
the flamethrower, which fires a constant stream of flame (requiring that the LMB be held down) and consumes immense amounts of ammo at a time. It sets enemies on fire, doing minor amounts of damage, while also applying damage to everything in front of the car, presumably doing a tick of it every time ammo is expended. It is exceedingly weak in some situations and exceptionally potent in others, while also being the weapon with the lowest reach out of the batch;
the machine gun, which fires a rapid spray of bullets, so long as the Player holds down the LMB, each of which hits one thing and then disappears. It is the highest capacity weapon, though it is not that exceptional at clearing out large swathes of enemies.
With that, the Player’s options are diminished. Now, what does the Player do with these options?
Zombie Driver HD offers three gamemodes - a story mode, which features 30-something missions, which all take place on the same map (a city), with more sections of the city becoming available as the Player progresses through the missions. These missions are all very simple, though - each and every one of them requires that the Player travels to a location, with their car, killing zombies on the way there, and then killing even more zombies at that particular location until the game decides that enough zombies have been killed, at which point progress will be made.
That progress includes either the Player being tasked with picking up a number of passengers, and then having to drive them to the base (where the mission started), putting down an object (and then defending it by killing zombies until the game decides enough have been killed), or going back to the base. There are a few exceptions to this rule, though they also swirl about the same mechanic - the Player is granted a special vehicle, roughly unique for that particular mission, and needs to drive to a location, kill zombies, pick up cargo, and then deliver the cargo somewhere else; alternatively, drive to a location and park in a particular spot.
The most exceptional moments are the boss battles, which require that the Player drives to a location and kills a single, monstrously huge zombie that does not move, but does things that ordinary zombies do not do. The boss fights are entertaining and roughly engaging, with each of the bosses having a small number of attacks that they perform depending on where, relative to them, the Player’s vehicle is.
Unfortunately, one of the game’s issues props up over here; in fact, it is prevalent throughout the entirety of the game, throughout all of the story mode (and the other two modes), and that is the movement. The cars are all exceptionally disinterested in cooperating with the Player. All of them have middling-to-terrible handling, making precise movements very challenging. That is further exasperated by the fact that all cars simulate themselves as proper cars - with weight, with momentum, with physics too.
That would have been pretty neat, were it not there exclusively to mess with the Player. It is EXCLUSIVELY a detriment. The Player needs to drive fast, because if they are driving slowly, they will be unable to run through the hordes of zombies, and will wind up slowed to a crawl or stopped almost entirely, resulting in them taking loads of damage and winding up in a fail state. However, driving fast is not really that neat, because the game does its damndest to simulate actual vehicular mechanics.
Hitting something has the potential of flipping one’s car over, forcing it to do cartwheels, crashing on its side. Fortunately, the car does not get damaged from collisions, but stopping is exceedingly troublesome, due to the fact that many of the missions are time-sensitive, and the other gamemodes are also very unkind to folks stopping still; least of all is the need to mention that the zombies love stationary targets.
Turning happens slowly, barely; braking feels off, as if it does not work; drifting is quite difficult to pull off; on and on the issues go, and the redeeming qualities are not as plentiful as one would hope they would be. Now, in a vacuum, simulating a vehicle like that would be pretty neat, and being able to drive it around a vast playground (such as the city in Zombie Driver HD) would be enjoyable, because, well, driving a car, even only virtually, is fun.
However, here comes the issue - zombies. The city is full of zombies, and they are everywhere. To deal with zombies, the Player either runs them over or shoots them with weapons. Good enough, in theory, and actually doing that is decently enjoyable, almost lending itself to being described as good, mindless fun.
Alas, it is not that good. There is a mechanic - the killing spree mechanic, let’s call it that - which tracks how many zombies, in rapid succession, have been run over (and killed, however there is a caveat here). Running a few zombies over starts a killing spree (or a combo), and the more zombies the Player keeps running over, without dropping the combo, the higher the killing spree goes. As a reward for each killing spree, the Player gets money (in story mode) which is used to purchase upgrades (more on that later), but the neat thing here is just being able to get silly numbers and doing the combo.
Okay, so far - so good, there’s nothing problematic in sight. A car with simulated weight running over zombies, bumping here and there - looks good. And indeed, it does look good, and when it works, it WORKS… But it does not really want to work, due to the fact that the zombies spawn in packs. They are interspersed around the city, enough to almost make it feel as though the city is crawling with zombies, but not enough to actually be everywhere. There are often large sections of the city - whole streets and even intersections - that are empty, where no zombies can be found.
And that’s a problem - because those are not rare, those are the norm. The Player, while trying to rack up a combo, will ultimately wind up running out of zombies to run over in the zombie-infested city, and the combo will fall off, not because the Player did something wrong, but because there are NO zombies to run over. That… That feels bad. Very, very bad.
It takes the entire point of the game - running over zombies - and makes it unsatisfying in a very real way. This loops back around to the driving - which is somewhat satisfying, but has these little issues that pile up. One of them is the feeling of slowness, sluggishness, coupled with a catatonic responsiveness that is always insufficient. The vehicles the Player drives can move very quickly, but they never have the option to get up to speeds that would allow the Player to close the gap between the last zombie on this street and the first on the next one, thus creating an opportunity for tremendous disappointment.
Now, it could be argued that it’s all about being smart with what turns the Player makes, and, sometimes, that is the case, because there might be a zombie pack to the left, rather than forward or to the right, but often that only extends the combo by a bit, before the whole thing teeters out thanks to there actually being no packs of zombies in all three possible directions. It is unsatisfying, and the speeds that the Player gets up to, trying to find this next pack, often play into messing with the Player and undermining those efforts.
In the event that the speed is enough to get to the next pack, most often there will be one or two zombies shambling towards the vehicle, but they will not be directly in front of it, which would require that the Player makes corrections so they can hit the zombies in question - well, the unwieldy handling and the speed at which the vehicle moves make it almost impossible to properly make those corrections, resulting in the vehicle whizzing past the zombie, costing the Player the combo. It is unsatisfying, when it could be oh-so satisfying.
Another bit of trouble with just how unsatisfying it is comes from the sounds the vehicles make, but that’s a Presentation issue. Now, the Gameplay suffers in another way - by implementing ‘no hit’ zombies, which, when hit, explode and take a huge chunk of health out of the vehicle that ran them over.
Those show up only a couple of missions into the story, with the experience prior to their appearance being a lot more enjoyable, because they are bigger than any other zombie, and waddle about indiscriminately, oftentimes appearing to get spawned off the screen, but only by a bit, and right in front of the Player’s vehicle. These things are exceptionally horrible, in the sense that running them over is the last thing the Player wants to do, but they are not uncommon - every pack has either one, two or even three of them - and so the Player, who is already not very satisfied by the way zombie packs spawn and are roped together, is further unsatisfied by the fact that now they need to be careful about which zombies they DO get to run over, which leads into their combos suffering even more.
The game’s point - to run over zombies and occasionally shoot them - is undermined by the introduction of these exploding zombies. Worse yet, they are supposedly dealt with via weapons, and sometimes that does work, but only rarely, due to the poor handling of the vehicles. Aiming does not exist - weapons fire in the direction the vehicle is facing, and due to their placement, they can be exceedingly wonky. Needing to hit a single target is often difficult, because it requires that the Player drive straight at it, risking slamming into the exploding zombie if they do not kill it.
Worse yet, some weapons (such as the flamethrower, which is exceptionally effective at killing exploding zombies) need to be fired at maximum range, with the Player stopping their vehicle’s movement, if they want to avoid the damage caused by the explosion - because the exploding zombies, when killed by anything, explode, and there is an area of effect, which is quite large. So the means to dealing with exploding zombies is to either take a large chunk of damage and risk blowing up, or to simply abandon the idea of getting a huge, juicy combo, because the Player needs to stop to avoid getting chunked.
There are also the issues of rockets sometimes being ineffectual because there are zombies between the vehicle and the exploding zombie, and they absorb the blow, leading into the Player having fired and tried to deal with the exploding fellow but getting cucked out of a success. A similar situation arises with the machine gun, because if there is anything between the vehicle and the exploding zombie, it will absorb the shots until it dies.
So there are many issues that compound and make the main gist of the game - running over zombies and chaining combos together - very difficult (impossibly so, because, as stated, the Player runs out of zombies to run over) and unsatisfying. There’s even more to it than just that - as an example, the missions in the story mode require area control, killing a number of zombies until a certain spot is empty, but the wonk on display is monstrous, because only in those conditions do zombies seemingly keep coming and coming, and the means to aim are dreadfully clunky, and so there’s a vast amount of displeasure that gets mounted onto the Player.
The game tries to deal with that issue by providing weapon objects in the vicinity of these areas, so that the Player can at least arm themselves and be able to do more than just run over the zombies (in a confined space, so lots of maneuvering, and little potential for combo stringing), but the issue of aiming persists, and the amount of ammo is insufficient, while the objects respawn far too slowly, thus leaving this bothersome experience of securing the point… And that just keeps happening.
Now, actually, the story mode is quite competent and enjoyable. As the Player completes missions, they unlock upgrades and cars. Every mission has a bonus objective that either unlocks a new upgrade, a car, gives the Player bonus money or even provides discounts. These are funky and enjoyable, and suitably challenging, too, whenever they choose to be. The upgrades are pretty neat, in theory, and in practice they also work.
The Player can upgrade their vehicle’s armor (how much damage it takes when hit), the vehicle’s ramming capacity (how easily it mows through zombies without slowing down or being stopped) and the vehicle’s speed. The first two upgrades are superb; the third is not, because it makes the already jerky handling even more problematic. Vehicles with a higher base speed stat (because all vehicles have a different set of base stats, with some having exceptional amounts of armor and ramming but low speed, and others having high speed and barely anything else) are very spastic in the way they move, and often lead into situations where the Player is unable to control them for a bit, due to the fact that they spin out or flip over.
Still, conceptually, and in practice, the upgrades work, and the way they are doled out is quite neat. Then there are the weapons - they also have upgrades, with the first tier being the unlock for the weapon and allowing the object to spawn in the world, while the subsequent ones make it better in every regard. Those are stellar.
Lastly, the vehicles - they’re varied, they all control differently and have different strengths or weaknesses. Some are humongous (like the bus), and are quite slow, but very sturdy, and can carry 48 passengers (the most the Player could need to carry in a mission was either 12 or 16, so that has them covered), while others, like the sports car, are speed only and crumble when something sneezes at them. It’s a good variety of vehicles for a vehicle game.
Ultimately, there is a lot it is missing, but that, which it lacks, is what would stop it from reaching the highest grade. However, the game has two more gamemodes.
The good one (other than story mode) is called Slaughter. In it, the Player picks a vehicle - base stats, no weapons or boosts, no upgrades - and is dropped in a small area. The task is to simply survive for as long as possible, and zombies spawn infinitely, in ‘waves’, though they do not really spawn in waves, instead the Player’s progress is measured in waves, while zombies just spawn whenever and however.
With each completed wave, the Player is informed that they have earned a reward - and that reward is a weapon upgrade and, potentially, a vehicle upgrade. That means that an object has spawn somewhere on the map (highlighted by a User Interface element) and once the Player drives through it they will get it - in the case of vehicle upgrades, its either armor, speed or ramming (up to 3 of each can be acquired), and in the case of weapon upgrades, it’s the 4 weapons and the speed boost. Picking up a weapon upgrade causes it to appear on certain spots around the map, occasionally, allowing the Player to get the weapon and use it to slaughter zombies. There are also healing objects that appear (necessary) and also money objects (utterly worthless, just take up an object spawn and render it empty for longer than it would have otherwise been).
Now, Slaughter seems to be, conceptually, amazing - because it’s all about killing as many zombies as possible, so that means the Player can rack up insane combos, right? Wrong. The way the zombies spawn somehow manages to emulate the ‘there are no more zombies’ of story mode, and so the Player constantly drops their combo, because, well… There are no more zombies here.
On top of that, of course, there are also exploding zombies that spawn, and they spawn in gratuitous quantities, so the idea of trying to string up combos quickly dissipates and is replaced by just the struggle to survive. Playing Slaughter on a higher wave becomes a very intense experience, and in that sense it is incredibly engaging, but there is a large part of it that stems from the issues that plague the game. The poor handling, the way objects are situated, requiring incredibly precise and well planned out movements to get to without causing a collision and subsequent stop, followed by loads of damage taken, the fact that there are potentially useless objects that could have been useful ones - that mounts and makes the experience lesser than it would have otherwise been.
Ultimately, Slaughter is about as good as story mode, if a bit more engaging, but it winds up coming short due to the fact that, at one point, there are just so many zombies on screen, and half of them are ones that use ranged attacks, while another quarter are exploding zombies, that it becomes nearly impossible to actually handle the stress without having a weapon (and that somewhat discounts the flamethrower and machine gun, because the former does its damage in such a manner that it causes exploding zombies to still chunk the vehicle while the latter is never going to actually do anything when it comes to clearing out the 300 zombies present), as a result of which it winds up being a gamble on whether the Player gets rockets or the rail-gun, or whether they do not.
Lastly, the game fumbles the bag by introducing ‘Blood Race’, the third gamemode, which is repugnant garbage. Conceptually, it almost makes sense - let’s have the Player drive one of their vehicles against the clock! It’s like a car game, but it’s also zombie driver, and has zombies and guns. Blood Race features three sub modes - one of them is just a race, in which the Player needs to finish a number of laps first, before any other racers manage it; another is a race against the clock, in which the Player needs to drive through checkpoints to get extra time, while also killing zombies and destroying destructible objects to get more time, so as to remain in the race as long as possible; the last mode is one in which the Player has a certain amount of time to get a number of eliminations - kills on the other racers.
Conceptually, these work, somewhat, but they also fail horrendously. Starting with the race against time, dubbed Endurance - the Player has, as an example, 50 seconds, after which their vehicle explodes. They are dropped on a race track, which features loads of destructible objects, and then weapons, speed boosts and healing objects. The race track also features a number of checkpoints that, whenever passed through, award a few seconds of extra time. Additionally, destroying destructible objects grants the Player around a tenth of a second per destroyed object (but not always, sometimes far less, sometimes maybe more - it works in an exceptionally esoteric and inconsistent manner), and killing zombies also grants around a tenth of a second (but, again, works inconsistently). The goal is to just survive as long as possible.
The issue here is that there are very few zombies that spawn, and the destructible objects are situated by the sides of the race track, which winds and turns sharply, constantly, featuring a lovely design choice of having elements in the walls that should (and appear to be) a flat surface, but are actually jagged, creating tiny bumps that either completely stop the Player’s vehicle, when collided with, or force it to spin out, turning at 180 degrees, or better yet - flip it over, costing the Player roughly 7, maybe 8 seconds.
These are the most egregious elements - the walls, the sides of the race track are horrendously dangerous in that regard, and there is almost never any visual indicator whether something will cause the vehicle to bounce violently, stop still, or change course. If the Player goes into Blood Race after playing the story mode and Slaughter, then they will have come to expect that most walls and surfaces they run into act more like funnels rather than springs that flip the vehicle on its head, and so there’s a very unpleasant dissonance.
Another issue arises from the aforementioned fact that destructibles are on the side of the track, meaning that the Player needs to ram their vehicle into these precarious bumps so as to get the bonus time needed to get the coveted gold medal. Some weapons are better than others, but they are all vastly ineffectual, because they need the Player to be facing the target they want destroyed; and in this gamemode, the Player needs to be going as fast as possible, so as to get through checkpoints (because the Player needs a lot of luck, and everything else, to get enough time for a gold medal), which almost negates any ability the Player has to control their vehicle finely enough to allow for firing, resulting in them just plowing through destructibles, but with a flamethrower on their hood.
All of that could be overlooked, but this is where the need to mention one of the most egregious issues of the game arises. This game has HORRIBLE, UNFATHOMABLY BAD optimization, which, mysteriously, only shows up when playing Endurance (and going through Slaughter maps and story mode missions that take place at night). For some inexplicable reason, the way the game works when simulating night, is absolutely broken. It stutters, it lags, it makes the already flimsy responsiveness of the vehicles driven by the Player far worse, it occasionally decides that the vehicle is not being driven forward and starts slowing down - it’s almost unplayable. That’s very, VERY bad, and as a consequence of it Endurance (which always takes place at night, with one exception, if memory serves) is nigh unplayable.
The other two modes are where the game fails even on a conceptual level, because it introduces racing - which is cool - but then fails to actually develop mechanics for it, and instead forces the mechanics from the other mode into the racing mode. That means that in the racing segments, the Player has to wrestle the vehicle’s controls while trying to outrun other vehicles. That would have been fine, if the vehicles controlled by the AI (there is no multiplayer option) moved like the Player’s vehicle. Unfortunately, the AI cheats so unfathomably egregiously that it is not even funny.
Their vehicles always move at the same speed, regardless of whether they are making 180 degree turns, swerving left and right, or doing any other kind of maneuver. It’s as if the simulation part of the game, which affects the Player in an exclusively negative manner, does not apply for them - and that’s infuriating to experience. Another great idea that the developers had was to make the AI vehicles move faster than the Player’s vehicle while they are behind it, and to only gradually slow down once ahead, resulting in an utter impossibility to actually break ahead and allow the opponents to breathe one’s exhaust fumes.
That is further exacerbated by the fact that, on top of cheating (and taking every turn literally as if a hand is holding the vehicle and floating it over the race track) the AI also rams into the Player with dreadful efficiency. They love giving the Player’s vehicle little taps that somehow cause it to wildly swerve out of control and wind up turned at 180 degrees, left in a ditch and with seemingly no hopes of winning.
Then there are also weapons. The racing mode features weapons, naturally, and the way the objects work is skewed to favor those who are ahead, because they do not immediately respawn, so if one is trying to overtake an enemy that is ahead, and they both pass through a weapon object, only the enemy gets the weapon, and then ensures that if by some magical means the Player manages to get ahead of them, they will shoot the Player’s vehicle and destroy it, regaining the superior position.
Here’s the thing with destroying vehicles - the Player can destroy AI vehicles, but that does not mean anything to the AI, because the AI, as stated, cheats - the AI respawns immediately after being destroyed, and does so just off screen, right behind the Player, and gets up to speed immediately, and, as mentioned, moves way faster than the Player so long as it is behind the Player. On the other hand, when the Player gets their vehicle destroyed, they must stay and watch the burning wreckage soar through the air, then come to a stop, after which they get respawned a ways back, completely stationary, and have around half a second where they can not input anything. Then they need to get back up to speed, which happens slowly, and, ultimately, they are almost certainly not going to get first place if they get destroyed.
All of those things compound to make an unfathomably unpleasant experience, in which the AI so obviously and egregiously cheats, and the maps are designed to favor the AI’s ability to make impossible turns (there are literally impossible turns that require the Player to either slow their vehicle to a crawl or slam into a wall, while the AI magically goes through at max speed without any issue), to always be at the Player’s back, and to always be sporting some kind of weapon that will be more effective when used by them than when used by the Player… It’s just bad. It is not even unsatisfying, it is just bad.
If the idea is to race around, let’s have it be racing - but then let’s not have these ridiculous respawns and cheating AIs. That really makes everything pointless; and, as a reminder, the walls are still littered with little (invisible) bumps that make the Player’s vehicle spin wildly out of control, which bumps never have any effect on the AI.
Lastly, there is the Elimination mode, which, as stated, requires that the Player destroys as many AI driver vehicles as possible in a given amount of time. This one is fun, though with the impossible way the AI moves it is sometimes very difficult to hit them with the more precise weapons. It is also clearly where all the mechanics in play during the racing mode come from, and it is obvious that they suck horribly for a racing mode, because they’re devised for a gamemode that requires there to be enemy drivers ahead of the Player so that the Player can destroy them.
And now, with all that said, Zombie Driver HD is a decently competent Gameplay experience, so long as the Player does not step close to Blood Race, because that is some variety of leprosy that will sap all the enjoyment out of the game. Unfortunately, it is also the only source of vehicle skins and the ‘muscle car’ vehicle, so the Player actually needs to play it if they want to swag up their rides (and not pay money for DLC).
The act of playing the game is better than it is bad, but it carries such an overwhelming feeling of dissatisfaction that I cannot, in good conscience, give it any more than a merely passing grade. 1/3
Presentation
Zombie Driver HD looks surprisingly good, and it presents itself in a decent enough manner. Unfortunately, it does have some issues with information and the way it is provided to the Player, in particular when it comes to the second gamemode (Blood Race), in which it drops the ball and shows off what is, essentially, the tutorial for the gamemode in loading screens, which loading screens are very short and often just blink on by.
That is also true for the other gamemodes, but they are saved by the fact that the game also does some communication with the Player through text that shows up on the screen, while one is driving around, and, on top of that, none of the bits of information featured there are crucial (or they are, I can not tell, I can not read that much text, spread out so egregiously over the screen, in 2 seconds).
With that problem out of the way, the game’s appearance is very respectable. The city, and the other locations the Player is shown, are detailed enough that they do not become repetitive, over the course of a single play-through, of course. There’s a decent bit of fun that can be had with the way zombies get slain by the Player, as well as the remains of said zombies, or of the carnage itself.
There is a commendable attempt at color coding things - as an example, pick-ups all have a different color associated with them, with the unfortunate exception of money stacks and the flamethrower weapon, which, while different, are very similar, one being surrounded by an orange ring, the other being yellow. Additionally, the enemies also have a bit of that done for them - though very faintly, as there is only one type of enemy that really has a distinct color associated with them (that being green for the bloated zombies), while all the others are a hodge-podge of, largely, red and pink.
Overall, the game does a very good job at visually conveying to the Player what is what and what is important. Sometimes it is very non-diegetic and brash, as is the case of pick-ups, but that issue is a means of solving a problem, rather than a problem in and of itself; another, more appropriate example are the areas that the Player must travel to, or the spots where the Player must stop their vehicle, or the enemies the Player must kill - with the exception of the last one, these similarly solve an issue, and thus are not troublesome, but there is something about the neon lights marking everything that seems a bit off.
That is made exceedingly apparent by the fact that the game has some exceptionally good diegetic indicators, which create a bit of a contradiction between its components, letting the Player (or at least me) wonder why is the whole game not diegetic, or non-diegetic. These are very well done, and they relate to the killing spree of the Player, as well as the health of the Player’s vehicle.
When not on a killing spree, the car being driven is going to have its ordinary colors. However, when a killing spree begins, the car will gradually start getting stained with blood, until, at one point, the entirety of it is red, totally, which will happen after the Player gets a decent killing spree. That is very neat, though a bit pointless. However, the health of the Player’s vehicle is where the quality of this implementation comes into play.
While on full, or close to full, health, the car will be in its ordinary state, whole and running properly. Then, as the car takes more damage, it starts breaking up - pieces of it start falling off, exposing the machinery within, smoke starts billowing from its engine - which is really effective. Naturally, that is tipped off with the car catching on fire and looking like it is already a wreck when it is on very low health, which does a very good job at conveying the emergency of the situation the Player has found themselves in.
Other fields in which the game excels, when it comes to appearance, are the bosses. This game has a few of them, and each looks decently distinct from the others. The designs are nothing to scoff at.
The game also has some rather good lighting effects, shown off in levels that take place at night or during the story missions that do that. Unfortunately, these carry with them the tremendous horror of bad optimization, rendering the game nearly unplayable, which really knocks them down a notch. Fortunately, this issue is not present with the rain and storm effects, which are similarly good.
Surprisingly, Zombie Driver HD actually features voice acting, and it was not thoroughly terrible. Every interaction with a human character is voiced, and almost all the characters have different people voicing them.
Unfortunately, this is where the game’s praise will cease. In regards to sound and music, it really, REALLY falls off. The game features a few tracks that play on repeat and become unpleasant rather quickly, owed up to their small number, shortness and middling quality, but the greater issue here is found in the sound effects. The cars, all of them, sound HORRIBLE. For some reason the folks at Exor were unable to figure out how to actually add a satisfying engine sound, as a result of which the cars keep sputtering and seemingly building up, but in this most unpleasant, bothersome manner that barely reflects what is happening on the screen.
Similarly, the sounds that the zombies have are varied, but not varied enough, and the soundscape the game paints becomes far too repetitive and unpleasant. On top of that are the weapons, which do the job, but do not bring this OOMPH that could have fixed things. Alas, Zombie Driver is better off played muted, with something else in the background, which is a very unflattering conclusion. 2/3
Story
Zombie Driver HD tries to have a story, but at the same time fails spectacularly. It tries to do something with the setting it establishes (rather shoddily, as there are no named characters, instead all of them have the title of their occupations acting as their names, and the city the story’s events take place in is just ‘the city’), but ultimately fails on account of actively not doing anything with itself.
In short - an accident occurs at some kind of power plant or research facility, resulting in everything being zombiefied. Then, what appears to be the army moves in and recruits the services of a taxi driver who winds up being some kind of ultra driver of all kinds of vehicles and also a super soldier.
Said taxi driver goes around town, doing 30-something missions for the army’s general (who is the only named character, but only thanks to a little signature beneath each briefing the Player receives), over the course of which the driver, who is a dude, discovers something akin to a conspiracy, but nothing is ever explained, and gets scratched by a zombie cat.
Ultimately, the city is nuked, but not by way of the air-force, as the general is, apparently, not authorized to use it, and instead via a bomb in the city’s park. The driver, who has been getting comments about his sickly appearance from folks he has been saving, manages to make it out of the city before the blast goes off, but he either crashes and then fully turns into a zombie, or turns into a zombie at the wheel and crashes as a result of that, foreshadowing that the zombie situation is not actually contained.
The issue here is that the game tries to tell a story. It really does, but then it does it so ineffectively and so pathetically that it’s absolutely baffling. Doubt is thrown onto the ‘army’, and whether they are the actual military, rather quickly. Then, more and more information comes to light that makes things very suspicious - survivors making their way out via ship or plane being shot down from the sky or slaughtered on board the vessel, as an example. Other characters throw more shade, implying that things are thoroughly messed up.
That does not go anywhere, though, as the driver just keeps taking orders and doing missions for the general without even blinking, which could be interpreted in some way, but it’s pointless to do so. Ultimately, there is no revelation, everything is INCONSEQUENTIAL flavor text, perhaps with the exception of the briefings, and then the story ends.
It is very bare-bones, but it does have this element of mystery to it - so was the outbreak caused, or was it an accident? Is this military group actually the army (of the USA, because the city is obviously somewhere in the USA), or is it a private military bought by the corporation responsible, which itself is in cahoots with the government? It probably is the army, but still. The questions remain unanswered, with the Player being constantly edged but not allowed a moment to actually get to the finish.
Thus, it is unsatisfying, and very meager. It is clearly just there as dressing to put on the missions that the game throws at the Player, which is not a fault, but it is definitely not sufficient. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the Legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? Unfortunately, no. While it does do some things in a very interesting and entertaining manner, it has a lot of issues and short-comings that, ultimately, leave it simply lacking. 0/1
Conclusion
4/10 Zombie Driver HD is one of those arcade-ish games that are going to be very good for kids. Boot it up and let your preteens go wild, and they’ll have loads of fun with cars running over zombies, naturally failing to grasp the mechanics and the shortcomings of the game and having lots of fun. For adults, however, this is a middling experience at best that can kill some time and can be entertaining for a few hours, but past that… Its facade starts cracking and revealing a very, deeply unsatisfying product.
In the bag of mediocrity I chuck it, to gather dust forever. It had something, an inkling of goodness… Yet it failed to achieve it.