Really, I guess you set your own difficulty, but Zombie Hunter can screw you over pretty quickly. So how do you play Zombie Hunter without grinding? Do you just press your way through the encounters without doubling back? Do you grind in moderation? Try and stop me. It feels like grinding out some experience is expected. That can be fun, but the problem I find is that there is no baseline difficulty. It will happily let you over-level yourself and kill the boss in a couple of swats. Zombie Hunter’s biggest downfall is that it has no protection against grinding, if that bothers you. No one really tells you that the shops are there or that this is how you enter them, so you’re welcome. But what make these especially hard to find is the fact that in order to enter them, you have to hold Up and press B. Some are even literally hidden behind otherwise solid walls. There are often lots of doors in the environment, but only the rare one is an actual shop. I say “hidden,” but mostly because there aren’t any signs. On the other hand, you also get gold and there are hidden shops. So, if the enemies are playing shy about dropping their wallets, you may end up grinding unintentionally, just trying to end the stage. You need a key to exit each level, and like any of the drops, they’re random. If you backtrack into an enemy’s territory, it will respawn, meaning you can find your comfortable grinding spot and then rack up the levels. Zombie Hunter is a grinder’s paradise or Hell depending on how much you actually enjoy grinding. You either get an item or don’t from an enemy group, so unless you want to grind every encounter until they drop something, you might miss the best pick-ups.Īnd you will grind. Of course, there’s a chance that Zombie Hunter will just give you butt. However, if you get a level 8 smacker that love lasts forever. Your normal enemy-smacker doesn’t degrade, and neither does armor, but magical items and better smackers do. Enemies and their loot drops are different depending on which route you take, so there’s reasonable incentive to take different routes through the game.Įquipment is rated with numbers that denote both its strength and potential degradation. Your job is to get past six levels, but levels 2-5 have you select your route, so there are technically ten levels in the game in total. I’m even going to go as far as saying I enjoyed it. Despite all the shortcomings I’ve already listed, Zombie Hunter is a strangely solid game. The music is manic, but it isn’t really all that bad. There’s very little animation aside from your armor-person’s kickywalk. Zombie Hunter doesn’t want to track off-screen enemies, so just deal with it.

You don’t get experience, and you don’t get any loot. You can’t advance forward when combat is active, but if an enemy falls off the edge of the screen, they’re just gone. The loot they drop is always the same, except sometimes they don’t drop anything at all. The enemies on each screen are always the same. Not the combination of genres, but the almost half-assed meshing of systems. You have to jump over some holes, but not too many, and falling in a hole doesn’t mean instant death. It’s all about experience points, gold, and inventory management. Yes, it’s the unholy marriage of side-scroller and RPG. You side-scroll screen by screen, then some enemies pop out and you swat them to death with your iron death stick. These encounters are like the random encounters of a typical JRPG, but they’re always the same. It’s excessive! Then you actually start moving, and then you stop because there’s an encounter. Half of the screen in Zombie Hunter is taken up by its HUD.

I know this, because the first thing the game does upon being started is scream at you, “Hai Sukoa!” It was a nice jumpscare to start the game. Instead, it just mentions Hi-Score Media Work Corp, which was sued out of existence by Enix over a screenshot of Dragon Quest 2.

It tells me it’s from 1987, but doesn’t really tell me it was developed by Lenar. You know the opening of No More Heroes III where Travis Touchdown outlines this weird Deathman game, and the gamer part of your brain tells you that such a game couldn’t exist in the time period it’s supposedly from? That’s Zombie Hunter.

Virtual piano demons