Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 12/12/2025 00:01

Ultimate Zombie Defense – Review

Top-down wave-based shooters have always been popular, and often they don’t need too many bells and whistles to be very entertaining. That brings us to Ultimate Zombie Defense, one of such titles, which was released back in 2020 on Steam. The game has only now made its way to PlayStation consoles after being ported by Ultimate Games, a publisher that has provided us with many hit-or-miss ports in the past. We were curious about what side of the coin Ultimate Zombie Defense’s port would end up on. Story There’s no story in Ultimate Zombie Defense. You just pick a level, a specialist, and the difficulty, and you’re pretty much good to go. It’s one of those games that doesn’t need a narrative either, as it’s all about blowing zombies to smithereens on small enclosed maps. We wouldn’t have minded if there was some story progression here, but all in all, we didn’t mind the absence of a plot. Graphics Graphically, Ultimate Zombie Defense is nothing to write home about. The game looks extremely dated, rather bland, and somewhat unfinished. There isn’t that much asset variety, and the zombie variation is also not that impressive. Everything looks more like an early 2000s release rather than a modern top-down shooter. Even so, the performance is adequate, but there are several visual bugs with aiming, where the red dot goes somewhat ballistic at times. There was no optimization when it came to the game’s loading times, however, as even switching levels in the menu would force the game to reload the menu again. The UI also looks very cheap, and we often had different text windows clip over each other, making things impossible to read. The menu options are tiny, and the D-Pad button prompts are rather unclear at times. We struggled to navigate the in-game menu, and during our first few waves, we didn’t even get the build and shop button prompt pop-up (you can toggle this on or off with the press of a button). It felt a bit like a mess, to be honest. Sound The sound design isn’t too bad overall, but the music and sound effects are just very generic. You’ll be treated to what seems to be license-free rock music and basic gunfire SFX. Everything is functional, but we can’t imagine anyone actively looking up the soundtrack for Ultimate Zombie Defense any time soon. Gameplay Ultimate Zombie Defense is a top-down tactical shooter that originally came out back in 2020 for PC. The game has now been ported to PlayStation consoles, and not that well, we have to say, but we’ll get into that below. In the game, you just pick a stage, a character, and a difficulty level, and you can start playing right away. It’s your goal to survive and kill as many waves of zombies as possible, gaining experience for your chosen specialist. Sadly, the game doesn’t allow local multiplayer, which is a missed opportunity for a title such as this. The concept is straightforward, as you just need to survive waves of zombies, but the execution leaves so much to be desired. The game’s cracks start to show only mere moments into the experience, as button commands don’t respond, the menus are atrocious to work with, controls are sluggish, aiming feels off, and there are just a lot of minor bugs hampering the experience. The game also suffers from a lack of content, and we encountered quite a few minor bugs. On top of that, you’ll have to work with a regular mouse cursor, even when you’re in-game. Only by pointing the mouse cursor at an object will you get the corresponding button prompt to interact with it. This feels dated and silly for a modern release such as this, as you’d expect to be able to run up to the structure or item you want to interact with instead. It feels like this was a rushed port to serve as a cash grab with the recent release of Ultimate Zombie Defense 2 on Steam. Conclusion While Ultimate Zombie Defense has a certain foundation that could be entertaining, the PS5 port is sadly a disappointing experience. You’ll be treated to unresponsive button prompts, clipping text windows, clunky controls, base-building bugs, and so on. Even though we don’t have any experience with the PC version, we assume it’s best to pick up the game there, when looking at the many positive user reviews. While optimization patches may happen in the future, we suggest either waiting for those or until the game is offered at a heavily reduced price. As it stands now, the game just isn’t much fun. There are quite a few other and better options out there.