Zombie Massacre is a 1998 FPS made by Alpha Software for Amiga consoles, during the late-1990s FPS craze started by Doom where you get to... uhm, massacre zombies.
No, really.
Loosely based on Amiga's previous Doom-clone, Gloom (Amiga), your unnamed protagonist - presumably someone with a military-esque background - finds yourself in the corridors of a dungeon after infiltrating a mansion rumored to be where ilicit bio-experiments are taking place. Hit by the stench of the undead, you prepare yourself for the worst. Luckily, you have a gun, but unfortunately you're greeted by entire hordes of undead the moment you push open the first door nearest to you.
It's also a ridiculously short game compared to other FPS outputs at the time, having three short levels, a single boss fight and can be completed in around 40 minutes. Yes, really.
Welcome to the Undead Zone!
- Body of Bodies: The last zombie obstacle you need to overcome is a gigantic, hulking undead made of various zombie bodies stitched together. With three heads on their shoulders. It's as tough as it looks, soaking up hundreds of shots before you put it down.
- Charged Attack: One of the power-upgrades you can collect, which turns your projectiles red. Hold on the fire button and you can charge a concentrated blast to be unleashed at the undead.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Because of the graphic limitations, it's easy to tell most of the "new" areas are simply reskinned versions of previous stages, with power-ups and enemy placements rearranged. In fact the number of environments used the entire game can probably be counted on one hand.
- Flying Face: One of the tougher enemies in-game - gigantic, detached heads larger than the common zombie enemies, who takes more hits to destroy than other undead.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Some of the unfortunate victims who failed to escape can be seen hanging from their wrists on railings... with nothing under their waists. What's even worse is that they appear to be still alive. And unfortunately, you're unable to simply shoot them out of their pain, your bullets simply do nothing.
- Ludicrous Gibs: All of the game's enemies explodes into piles of bloodied guts when slain, with some pretty impressive gore effects considering the graphic limitations.
- Nightmare Face: The game greets you with a creepy green face that stares straight into your soul the moment you puts it in the console. It's the same face on the cover (pictured above). The same face also appears, filling up the screen if you die.
- Nothing but Skulls: It's a little hard to notice (because of the graphics) but in certain areas you might notice something amiss with the texture on walls. Take a pause from all the zombie-killing and behold, it's literally a wall of skulls.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Besides the walking dead, you can occasionally encounter ghosts floating around the dungeon. They can't be killed, but simply hovers away after a while.
- Spread Shot: Your default weapon can be upgraded to fire two or three blasts at a time. Which is helpful once the onscreen zombie horde starts piling up.
- Suspicious Videogame Generosity: The game loves doing this every now and then. You'll enter an area literally filled with power-ups and weapon upgrades, that boosts your firearm to a whole new level... just as the next immediate area throws a literal wall of zombies at you forcing you to finish off your extra supplies as quickly as you accumulates them.
- Zerg Rush: In the second half of the game, the lowest-level zombies will repeatedly overwhelm you with numbers.
