Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first stretch of All Zombies Must Die! understands why you came: there are zombies everywhere, you have twin-stick guns, and Deadhill is open enough to let you pick a direction and start clearing streets. Shooting through a crowd has immediate arcade appeal. It is not trying to make every encounter precious; it wants you moving, aiming, and making a noisy mess of the town.

Progress is where the game loses some of that momentum. Robotic gatekeepers block off new parts of Deadhill until you finish assigned tasks, which can mean hitting a zombie kill target or securing a particular item. That structure gives you concrete goals, but it also turns an enjoyably loose rampage into a checklist. If you are in the mood for directed objectives, they give the wandering purpose. If you only want to blast forward, the repeated errands can feel like a brake.

Crafting and leveling weapons give the killing a welcome long-term hook. Collecting what you need matters because it feeds into stronger tools, rather than simply padding out the map. The four-player offline co-op option is also the game at its most forgiving: shared zombie-clearing makes a routine objective feel more like a living-room brawl than a chore. Solo, the repetition is harder to ignore.

Graphics

The game uses a 2D, diagonal-down view that keeps both your character and approaching zombie groups in sight. Deadhill’s ruined-town setting suits the constant fighting, and the overhead angle makes it easy to track where a horde is gathering before you open fire.

Story

Deadhill has been overrun, and the immediate objective is as blunt as the title: kill zombies. You play as a town resident rather than a grand chosen hero, which fits the scrappy, local scale of the setup. The town is less a dramatic destination than a playground for the next firefight.

The gatekeepers supply the structure. By controlling access to different areas and assigning tasks, they turn the outbreak into a sequence of jobs. That is functional rather than especially compelling storytelling, but it does give your movement through town a clear reason beyond randomly thinning the undead.

Don’t come in expecting the narrative to carry the experience. The hook is the rhythm of wandering, fighting, gathering, and upgrading. The setting works best when it keeps pushing you toward another zombie-packed street, not when it asks you to invest in the errands themselves.

Overall Experience

All Zombies Must Die! is a serviceable undead shooter with a good instinct for immediate action and a less convincing instinct for pacing. The opening promise—free-roaming twin-stick slaughter in a zombie-infested town—is easy to enjoy. The gated objectives repeatedly dilute that promise, particularly when they ask for more of the same killing before letting you move on.

You will get more out of it with friends on the couch. Four-player co-op does not erase the repetition, but it changes the mood: a required kill count becomes something your group can bulldoze through together while experimenting with crafted, upgraded weapons. That is a meaningful difference for a game built around constant combat.

Give it a chance if you want a modest, mission-driven arcade shooter and can tolerate RPG-style grinding between bursts of action. Skip it if you need the freedom of an open town to stay truly free, or if fetch-and-kill objectives wear thin quickly. For background on its release and place as a successor to Burn Zombie Burn, see All Zombies Must Die! history and release information.

Retro Replay Score

6.2/10