Containment: The Zombie Puzzler is a simple, little, casual indie game that reminds me a little bit of Bejeweled. Not nearly as polished, but has a few unique quirks to it. These cool little features just aren't enough to make this game worth your time.
The game has a very simple and generic story, the people of the city are trying to flee the city and survive. It takes about 40 minutes to go through the game once if you take your time on your first play through. It's an alright game, about the expected quality you can expect from the average indie developer. If somebody were to organize this game in their steam library, they'd probably throw it in where they throw all the indie games they got in the various indie bundles where they bought it for just one or two games in the whole bundle.
The gameplay consists of exactly what it's title says. Containing zombies in a grid-like puzzle format. You move the citizens of the city around, and when the zombies are "contained" by citizens of all the same type, those dirty, shambling pieces of flesh are quickly slaughtered. Aside from the basic gameplay of the game, there are special effects items you can collect and use as you please. You can also interact with the environment of the puzzle which is a cool idea, although with such a short game, this feature couldn't come to it's full potential.
Another unique part of the game I found hilarious was the fact that there are certain actions you can take which are definitely for the purpose of eradicating zombies, but they kill off friendlies as well. I can't figure out why I found it's so funny, and yet I can do naught but laugh every time.
The graphics aren't exactly stellar, but they do their job. It's easy to see the difference between each and every piece of your puzzle, from the city cops to the lab scientists, and the zombies. It's simple to tell what is on your puzzle grid, and what is a part of the background environment. Now, talking about the background, what I liked about this game was the fact that the background would occasionally interact with the foreground, like a zombie would come up to the grid, and just devour one of the people.
And now that all the good stuff is out of the way, let's talk about what this game does bad. First off, it just isn't gratifying to see the zombies die. It's a mix of the static camera angle, the simple, one animation that always occurs, and the repetitiveness of the game. When you have to do the same things over and over again, it just gets more boring with the fact that the game is always visually the same. With no variation at all, it's hard to keep interest invested in the so-called "puzzle solving" yo do.
Despite calling itself a puzzle, there's not much solving to do. There are barely any obstacles in your way to killing the zombies off. Sometimes the grid isn't a square grid, that's about it. Sure, there are difficulty levels, but when the game is so short already, you get bored just going through it over again.
It's far too short of a game, there just isn't enough to see and do within the game to give it a good amount of replay value. There are unique features to this game that do make it interesting for a little while, but they aren't fleshed out enough to their full potential. Overall, this game could have been better. With some spit and polish, and some extra content, I could see a good game out of this.
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