First person shooters are starting to make their way to the App Store. One excellent option is Zombie Mansion. The game has its flaws, but it is a good effort at bringing some of the time-honored tradition of blasting zombies to your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Zombie Mansion begins by placing you trapped inside, go figure, a mansion. Fortunately you are armed with some sort of magic stick (apologies to 50 Cent) that fires energy balls at the undead.
You must use this to defend yourself against a series of zombies, skeletons, knights, and other unsavory creatures who try to prevent you from escaping. The controls are surprisingly good on the touch screen. On the left-hand side of the screen is a four-way directional arrow that controls forward, backward, and sideways movements. There is a left-and-right arrow above this that moved the main character from side to side. This is a bit more awkward to use, but I did not find myself needing to use this function all that much.
The weapon fires well and is quite accurate. Sure, I would prefer a shotgun or some type of automatic weapon, but I guess you can’t be choosy when surrounded by zombies. Escaping through the mansion takes a bit of brain work. There are hidden keys that open some of the locked doors. This was a strength, keeping the game from just dissolving into a mindless, button-smashing (or screen smashing in this case) shooter.
There are three levels of difficulty, each giving different scenes and an increasing number of enemies. After mastering the controls and how to maneuver throughout the environment you should find yourself ready to take on more challenges and fight your way through the zombie nightmare.
Zombie Mansion is relatively stable, though it did crash a couple of times during an extended zombie blasting session. In fact, on one instance it crashed, opened up iTunes, and went to an Abba song that my fiancee had loaded in my music collection. Now THAT is a real nightmare.
