If you’ve found yourself stricken with a severe case of the Mondays, why not give your life some perspective and appreciate the fact that unlike the citizens of The Raging Dead [Free], you’re not currently running for your life in a city filled with zombies with some omnipotent finger deciding whether or not your life is sacrifice for the greater good. (Or, if you are in a situation like this, I’d wonder why it is you’re reading TouchArcade instead of, well, not getting your brain eaten.)
We reviewed The Raging Dead when it was released earlier this year, and as someone who was always oddly captivated by the various Java-powered zombie infection simulators that made the rounds years ago, I thought the game was really cool. Much like said simulators, The Raging Dead uses similar AI to populate a game world which initially only has a few zombies (red dots) who instantly begin pursuing the humans (blue dots).
From our review:
As you might imagine, entire cities can be completely overrun with zombies unless the undead are stopped quickly, and that’s where the player comes in. Tapping on the screen will drop a bomb (or fire the machine gun, if that’s your preference), killing all zombies in the impact area. That impact area is painfully small at first, and that combined with the extremely zoomed out view in each level makes precision a bit difficult. Luckily, weapons can be upgraded with money earned at the end of each level to allow for a more forgiving blast radius, so players will be able to eliminate the zombie threat quickly and efficiently.
The interesting part of the game becomes apparent when you realize that your weapon has limitations like reload speed time, and you must sacrifice some civilians in order to prevent the infection from hitting everywhere in the city at once. The strategy is to quickly eliminate all the scattered zombies at the start of the level, and by the time you’ve done that it’s likely that the one or two that you missed have created a small army around their locations. That’s just the sacrifice that you’ll have to make if you want to be successful, because the only way to win is the eventually get all the zombies in a corner where they have no more civilian targets to infect and wipe them out all at once.
22 levels are included, as well as two weapons which you can upgrade in between levels. At the end of each level you’re graded, earn money for said upgrades, and potentially unlock in-game medals based on how many humans survive as well as how little damage you did to the surrounding city. I fully realize there are entirely too many zombie games on the App Store, but if you’ve got room on your device for just one more, The Raging Dead is worth a try especially while it’s free.
