Game Review: Dead Block
Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service
Jul 13, 2011
For: Xbox 360 (via Xbox Live Arcade) and Playstation 3 (via Playstation Network)
From: Candygun Games/Digital Reality
ESRB Rating: Teen (violence, blood, crude humor)
Price: $10
If you've grown tired of the tower defense status quo, "Dead Block" might interest you. Because while this, too, is a tower defense game at heart, it's also a third-person action game in which you directly control multiple survivors (either solo or via four-player splitscreen co-op) under attack from zombies. "Block's" mechanics are simple: You have to destroy furniture to gather wood for boarding up windows, scour through other objects to find keys and parts with which to make traps, and manually attack zombies who break through your defenses.
For whatever reason, music kills zombies dead, so the ultimate goal of each level is to assemble a guitar rig, play a very short rhythm game to rock out and wipe out all remaining undead. "Block's" merging of third-person action and tower defense goes smoothly, and its overall style - cartoony characters straight out of a "Team Fortress 2" tribute game, 1950s iconography, levels presented as episodes of a campy television show - is terrific. But the downside of merging those two genres is that they compromise rather than thrive.
The combat is clunky, your strategic options are little more limited than in a typical tower defense game (only so many windows and traps to configure), and while new characters, environments, items and traps show up on a regular basis, "Block's" later levels aren't drastically deeper than its early ones. But that's why it costs $10 instead of $50. "Block" provides a good return on investment for that price, and what those later levels lack in surprises, they redeem in terms of challenge.
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Copyright 2011 by Mclatchy -Tribune News Service
