Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition

Developer: Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team
Price: $1.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 4S

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Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition is an arcade action game in which you use a soccer ball to kill hordes upon hordes of zombies. While the core gameplay of Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition is pretty one-note, the game does a good enough job with storytelling and varying up enemy types to keep the game fairly interesting throughout.

Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition begins with you taking control of a punky kid named Jax, who just so happened to be bitten by a soccer-playing zombie. Forced to defend himself against the rising tide of undead, Jax chooses to use a soccer ball to go about saving his friends from the walking dead before he himself turns zombie.

As Jax explores his surroundings, he encounters waves of zombies, and its up to you to angle Jax's kicks so that the soccer ball hits incoming threats. Some of these enemies have armor, some require being hit with a power shot, and so on. There's actually a pretty deep set of zombie foes in Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition, which helps each new wave seem interesting and strategically demanding.

In addition to a wide cast of zombie enemies, Jax also takes advantage of several different weapons and powers to help make the zombie-slaying stay both manageable and fresh. As players kill zombies, they build up a super meter that can be activated to unleash powerups such as a kill satellite, lightning ball, or razor ball. In addition, there are levels where Jax is moving throughout the environment, either on foot or on a hoverbike, both of which provide different spins on the basic standing and kicking mechanic. Finally, other environmental elements, like civilians and lasers, play into later levels, which add their own set of new gameplay challenges. Upon completing the game, players also unlock a hardcore mode, which adds a level of replayability to the game.

If all of this sounds extremely familiar, it may be because Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition isn't a brand new addition to the App Store. Rather, it is an iPad game that has just recently been ported to iPhone-sized screens and, unfortunately, the game actually feels quite a bit like it. While the gameplay on its face is completely solid, the smaller screen size definitely makes aiming Jax's shots pretty difficult, so much so that later levels can feel unfair unless playing with a larger screen.

Aside from the screen size issue, my time with Pro Zombie Soccer involved one major bug in which the win-state for a level was met, but nothing happened. I was stuck at the end of a particularly challenging level that I had just finished with no option but endlessly kick a ball in an empty level, quit out of the game, or just restart the level entirely. It felt horribly unfair and it almost completely sold me off of the game entirely.

Overall, Pro Zombie Soccer Apocalypse Pocket Edition is a largely competent, though simple, arcade game. It has just enough depth to feel demanding, but struggles to keep that balance on the smaller screen. I'd recommend that players with iPads should look for this game there, but settling for the iPhone version isn't completely out of the question.