Atom Zombie Smasher



A real time strategy game by Blendo Games, released in 2011. Included in the third Humble Indie Bundle.

Set in the 1960s, in Nuevos Aires, AZS tasks the player with evacuating as many people as possible, before they're overrun by the emerging Zed hordes.

To accomplish this, the player is given control of a rescue helicopter, as well as various mercenaries, capable of fighting the Zed.

That... and orbital nukes.

Provides examples of:

 * Apocalypse How: As a game mechanic, even! There are four levels of infection in an area, the bigger it is the harder the map is. The descriptions of the levels match up with ours, with level 1 representing contained outbreak and 4 being a total infection of the area.
 * A Winner Is You: The ending is the same, no matter who actually won.
 * Color Coded Armies: Yellow dots for civilians, purple dots for Zed. Infantry squads are shown as a green dot inside a large bubble representing their line of sight.
 * Cool Helmet: One of the characters shown in the page image, "Animal" Smith, is always wearing his Viking helmet.
 * Subverted in the final cutscene:
 * Continuity Nod: Gravity Bone, an early freeware game by the same developer, is also set in the city of Nuevos Aires. It's an adventure game that pushes the style of 1960s spy movies to absurdity.
 * Cut and Paste Environments
 * Death or Glory Attack: Landing the helicopter near zombie entry point may let you save more civilians... but if you mismanage it could also mean you just fed people to the zombie horde.
 * Earn Your Happy Ending: In a minor example, it's occasionally possible to rescue everyone in a city, avoiding the Sadistic Choice.
 * Easy Communication: Semi-averted - infantry and snipers react immediately, the artillery doesn't though. Either way, you can hear the radio chatter as the orders are being relayed
 * For Massive Damage: Your artillery not doing enough damage to the bunch of enemies there? Rescue some more civilians and kill some more Zed, unlock a firing of the Catbird Cannon and pulverize everything in a large radius.
 * Then there's the "Elephantbird," a massive artillery gun that replaces all other mercenaries on your roster. Both fall under Macross Missile Massacre, with the Elephantbird firing more shells with far greater accuracy and reloading near instantaneously. It's sadly only available for use once an in-game year, while the Catbird is available every round after being unlocked.
 * Giant Mook: Arriving later on in the game, they are essentially Bosses in Mook Clothing. Only explosive damage can harm them.
 * Herd Hitting Attack: The entire point of artillery, especially when upgraded.
 * Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The intermissions.
 * Kill Sat: As mentioned above, Catbird Cannon. Results in a barrage of missiles.
 * Last Stand: The infantry can't get infected, but you may often find yourself defending the last pick-up point until all civilians are zombified.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: Catbird Cannon and Elephantbird both result in this.
 * Also, to a lesser degree, the upgraded regular artillery.
 * Nintendo Hard: Oh so much, and from the very beginning, mark it.
 * Nuclear Option: They're called Llama Bombs.
 * Actually, these are bioweaponry. Literal weaponized llamas.
 * Non Entity General
 * Not Using the Z Word: Oddly enough, it's used once in the opening cutscene but never again during gameplay.
 * One Hit Point Wonder: The civilians get infected immediately they touch the zombie.
 * Point Build System
 * Randomly Generated Levels: A large part of the challenge.
 * Real Time With Pause
 * Risk Style Map: the overworld view.
 * Save Scumming: Your game saves every time you win, lose, or concede a level, making it impossible to 'undo' an action. Unless you realize that, as noted here, your savegames are saved in the App Data folder. Amazing how much Fake Difficulty can vanish when you can Set Right What Once Went Wrong?
 * Sniper Rifles: One mercenary unit is a team of snipers set up on a rooftop. While you can tell them which direction to shoot in, you can't target individual enemies, and they stop shooting while rotating to a new position.
 * Sniping Mission: If you end up with only a sniper team and barricades/mines/bombs.
 * Support Power: Allows you to fire a missile barrage.
 * Too Dumb to Live: Some civilians decide to run straight into the attacking zombies instead of to the helicopter 20 feet away.
 * Top Down View: Justified, as you're working for Orbital Command. A lot of your artillery is fired from Kill Sats, after all.
 * Veteran Unit: All mercenaries level up. Even barricades.
 * Videogame Caring Potential: So you've evacuated the city, but there is still one little fellow left behind. You'd better try your hardest to save that little dot from a terrifying death by zombies.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential (as well as Sadistic Choice): ...on the other hand, accidentally (and "accidentally") blowing up civilians close to the zombies is not infrequent. The nature of the game also means choosing which civilians to evacuate, and which become zombie fodder. The author has stated that putting the player in a position of making difficult decisions is part of the design.
 * Weaponized Animal: Llamas. Work more or less like a nuke.
 * Zerg Rush: At night, zombies come swarming in from every single entrance to the city.
 * There are also monthly modifiers that can shorten the length of a day or make the zombies run even faster (thankfully, you can't get both at once).
 * Zombie Apocalypse: Played with, as some of the background material that can be unlocked suggests people have been dimly aware of the zombies' existence for decades. They've simply never posed a threat to civilization before.