Music has always been a big part of playing beat ’em ups for me. Ever since having my preteen eardrums blown to pieces by Maximum Carnage, I’ve come to expect a lot from games where I’m knocking heads around. Charlie Murder pulled it off a while ago with flying colors, but I’ve been left without my mixture of rocking tunes and beat ’em up action ever since. Now, Quaternion Studios is trying to fill that gap with Rock Zombie, a game about an all-ladies rock band (Whose members are all witches) fighting off a zombie threat. You know, pretty standard stuff.
The game is a little rough around the edges, but it’s not often that you see one-man teams working with 3D assets, do you? The game looks sharp for having been made by one person, reminding me of many of the Dreamcast beat ’em ups I played years ago. Your job is to pound zombies flat with a few simple combos and magic attacks, all of which would be kind of plain without the weird story and driving soundtrack. The story about zombie-fighting rock witches is just silly enough to be a perfect fit for the genre, but its the music that makes you want to keep knocking skulls in. The game draws from Hard Rock, Alt Rock, and Nu Metal to give it a neat soundtrack that makes it stand out among other beat ’em ups and keeps the action moving.
It’s $6.99 on Desura if you want to give it a go yourself, and with tons of unlockables, it’ll keep you going for a while for that price. The only strange thing about the game is that there’s no multiplayer at the moment, which is a downright crime for a beat ’em up. Still, it’s not like I have any friends anyway, so I’ll just keep my zombie killing shenanigans to myself. If you dig it, feel free to help the man out on Greenlight, too.
