Price: $0.99 Score: 9/10 Category: Games
Every gamer has seen their share zombies and shoot ’em up blood baths, but odds are you’ve never seen anything like Call of Mini: Double Shot. Game developer Triniti created a successor to their walking dead original, but this zombie slayer is bigger and badder than ever.
Call of Mini: Double Shot is one part dual control destroyer (like those games where a robot hovers around in one direction while firing off a machine gun in the other) and another part kill or be killed. The only object is survival, but in order to do so you must withstand 500 zombie waves.
If 500 waves of relentless and bloodthirsty undead attacks sounds incomprehensible, you’ve got the main gist of Call of Mini, but let’s paint the full picture just in case. Call of Mini: Double Shot starts with a Lego=looking protagonist and his law enforcement friend. The fighting duo has been assigned to help the town of Lakeside with their zombie issue, but when a fairly simple job elevates, Mini and his cop friend sometimes lose their lives in a blood splattering of red.
At this point an epinephrine shot can keep Mini fighting, but not without a price. This is where bloodbath war zone starts to earn some points in the strategy department. Although gamers will spend most of their time sending zombies to their knees, Call of Mini: Double Shot also rocks a gritty money component that requires a little thought. This also happens to be the way the Triniti earns their real money, but this is one of the few situations where in app purchases appeal to fanatics without inhibiting the casual to semi-serious gamer experience.
Over the course of the game 12 types of zombies emerge from the dead. Unlike the mythical walkers of pop culture, these zombies seem to have at least enough of their faculties to explode like smart bombs, shoot at the living, and send green fireballs more advanced than human weapons. To fight this increasingly intense deluge of life-suckers, Mini must spend earned money to upgrade everything from armor and medical kits to guns and power ups. All said and done there are more than 21 deadly weapons, and lots to get mixed up in, but leaderboards and achievements don’t feel like they’d ever get in the way for anyone looking to play just for the shoot ’em up element of Call of Mini: Double Shot.
A bird’s eye view over Triniti’s latest game offers a few high level takeaways. The first is the genre appropriate head banging techno. Game soundtracks don’t get much better than this one. When it comes to graphics, Call of Mini: Double Shot is a little on the cartoonish side, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Triniti knows exactly what their game looks like, and everything about the graphics are consistent. The only thing I’d ask is that they mix up the neighborhood landscapes every few levels, because after awhile hiding behind the same wrecked car loses a little of its initial appeal.
From a controls perspective, Call of Mini: Double Shot hits the target right between the eyes. This game runs smooth and sweet so expect to get sucked in and keep playing. These levels are long and intense, but then again, so is fending off waves of zombies as they make their final play for your life.
Bottom Line: Call of Mini: Double Shot is grim and gritty. The gameplay is simple but the strategy is complex. Expect to play long and hard, because this is you vs the zombies.
