A few thousand games and reviews in, one of the advantages of perspective is that you quickly lose patience with titles that simply don’t make the cut. Whether the problems are a matter of design, technical implementation, or just lackluster play, shortcomings that others have successfully avoided or muscled through can’t be brushed aside for the sake of merely being polite. Put plainly, YellowPips pretty well falls into all 3 traps described, and honestly doesn’t feel like a very serious effort worthy of your hard-earned dollars in a sea of competitors that are superior.

What first struck me as odd was simply that I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing when I started out. Was it a shooter, an action game, or something else entirely? The lack of any in-game guidance made it no more clear, leaving me to simply scroll around and look for anything at all I could interact with. Well, it turns out that the initial phase of play is a bit like a “clicker” on PC, where I simply needed to go to the scant number of icons representing resources and repeatedly tap on them in order to collect them. There are then structures you can build that will require those same resources, with most buildings requiring multiple phases of stuff being thrown to them, and then helping you to build up your town and helping it to thrive.

But wait, did I mention there are zombies? Well, sort of. Periodically your town will be attacked by mini hordes of the undead, moving the game into a pretty basic third-person shooting mode. Though simpler in its design, this phase completely reminds me of any number of free-to-play mobile shooters where you’ll be able to shoot whatever is in front of you, and then move through gates representing some bonus or cost. Worse, I’d say the visuals and controls here are absolutely nothing special, with chunky geometry, blurry textures, and jittery animations. Cap it all off with a somewhat bizarre dance whenever you complete this phase, and what looks like a stock pre-generated celebration video, and it completes the trifecta of underwhelming and pretty baffling elements that compose this mess that struggles to justify its pricing and place in the eShop.