Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip

Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip is everything you've come to expect from a lazy movie tie-in. Its gameplay is mechanically competent but it's bland beyond belief, short, cynical and lazy. It has the most tenuous of links to the actual film it portrays and is ultimately a very basic twin-stick shooter with a tired-looking Zombieland skin tossed carelessly on top – it also costs far more money than it has any right to. If this was a free mobile game you might get an hour or two of braindead time-wasting out of it, but as an almost full price console release, it's pretty much indefensible.

Zombieland Double Tap is not a total failure. However, there are already plenty of Twin Stick Shooters in 2019, which are better in all areas. The level process quickly becomes dull, the joke of the film template is not saved into the new medium due to the weak setting and presentation. Zombieland is doomed, because there is simply no reason not to use one of the competitors.

Zombieland Double Tap was a great movie. The game with the subtitle Roadtrip is not so great. It's upsides are the co-op for four players and it's short levels. Unfortunately there are a lot of downsides. The game is way too short and doesn't always save your progress. Next to that the game never gets really interesting. This could be way better.

Zombieland Double Tap Road Trip completely strips away the charm and wit which makes the films so endearing and replaces it with cheesy mind-numbing dialog sprinkled with dull gameplay. It's basically an overpriced two-hour promo for the movie that has very little to offer unless you are a hardcore fan of twin-stick shooters or Abigail Breslin.

Luckily, Double Tap itself was much better than its game counterpart. Based on historical examples, this isn’t the first time nor will it be the last time we can make that statement.

There are many different areas where Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip comes up short. A $40 price tag is just nuts for a 2 hour game with a barebones presentation and gameplay. Heck, the reload animation is your character looking downwards. That's it. The only time I died in the game was on the final mission when bugged out, and I became unable to shoot. The boot menu screen is only presented as a vertical graphic, and even the main menu doesn't fit the screen. It's plainly obvious that the game was rushed out the door to capitalize on the movie.

With countless superior zombie twin-stick shooters out there, Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip feels like a cheap movie tie-in.

Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip does have the feel of a good party game. Its variety of enemies and weapons, as well as the flow of combat, all lend itself to a consistent ride of adrenaline. But even if you ignore the sometimes cringy elements of its voice acting, there’s just not enough content for such a basic experience to justify the price of Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip.

What we have here is a game that is short. Doesn’t look very good. Plays decent, and is better playing couch co-op. I have to say I had more fun playing this than say the recently released Contra Rogue Corps, but that’s not saying much. The brief gameplay time is both a good and bad thing here. It prevented me from getting overly bored, but the price tag of $39.99 makes this one a hard one to swallow, even for hardcore fans of the genre or zombies. Nothing here is completely broken or offensive, it’s just so lackluster and basic it hurts what could have been a bit of a fuller and funnier experience.

Had the campaign run a little longer, it might have been a little easier to recommend Zombieland: Double Tap – Roadtrip. Shooting your way through zombies is entertaining, and when you’re having fun it’s easy to overlook the game’s technical downfalls. But when so many other, much better, twin-stick shooters exist, paying full-price for this just because it ties into a somewhat-popular movie franchise is quite a hard sell.