As I’ve said so many times before, what tends to make me happiest with games is when they surprise me, bringing me new and unique experiences to discover and enjoy. Having seen so many titles struggle, and sometimes outright fail, to then pull it all together though, I’m sympathetic to the risks developers who go down these paths are taking. After making a pretty unique take on pinball with their last title, the team behind Zombie Rollerz has now gone in an entirely different direction, and there’s no doubt that it’s a big swing that takes plenty of risks, but for the right audience it should still have plenty of appeal.

Blending together some strategy, auto-fire action, people management, and then throwing in plenty of roguelike unpredictability, it’s definitely a title for people who enjoy a bit of complexity. Guiding your landbound ship through many pockets of waiting zombies, you’ll need to use a mix of skill, smarts, and sometimes quite a bit of luck to navigate your way through troubles and survive what can sometimes be overwhelming periodic onslaughts. Your goal is pretty well always to simply survive, and how you manage to do that will be very much up to you. You can try to weave your way through to find low-hanging fruit for easy upgrades, biding your time and hoping to build up resources enough to take some punishment, or you can opt to simply attack anything you see, hoping that you can weather some early struggles by assigning your crew appropriately to keep your ship in one piece, emboldened by early perks that could put you ahead of the curve as you make progress.

For quite some time the good news is that there’s a load of new perks, special crewmembers, equipment, and more to progressively unlock, opening the door to more powerful builds. Of course, the challenge is that the more possibilities there are, the more you’ll need to try to lean into what your current run is throwing at you, maximizing your potential rather than thinking there’s only a narrow path to success. Getting over the hump of learning how best to manage your ship, weapons, and crew can take some time and experimentation though, and while the game is good at getting you started, later success will mostly be reliant on your planning and skill. It makes for a great challenge for people who love to tackle new ideas, but since it’s venturing off in its own direction that may not line up with what the average person is looking for.