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Zombie Death Town
Publisher: Rarr! I'm A Monster Publishing
by Rowan T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/04/2010 21:22:19

Zombie Death Town is a good example of a budget Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, the writing is very good and features some great scenes and ideas (one in particular had me burst out laughing, whilst another actually made me feel shocked) actaully , the fighting mechanics work well and you're getting you money's worth in my opinion.

However there are a number of flaws with the product, which will be the focus of my review and I'll address in a primarily spoiler free way as much as possible.

The first is a minor gripe about the description of the how the combat system works, the problem is that it swaps between using 1st and 3rd person perspectives, even in the same short sentences.

When it explains you making an attack for example, it starts by saying you make a roll and then says to "check the total against the Combat Score (CS) of the attacker", in my opinion it would have been much easier to say "check the total against YOUR Combat Score (CS)" or alternitively simplify the entire thing to simply "If the attacker rolls under their Combat Score (CS) they have sucessfully hit."

The second is the maze-like portions of the story, the first involves you randomly walking through the streets with no sense of where you're going, which will often result in you re-reading till you find a link to a different section of the book. The second involves you literally reading the same text over and over again (9 times!!!) to make you way through a room full of cubicles noted as being identicle and unfeatureless due to company policy, honestly this part of the book really pissed me off and I quickly searched through the page directions at the bottom of each of the nine entries to find the one that took me where all this was going to lead.

To address these, I'd suggest giving some explanation to where a certain road would potentially lead in the case of the first situation; and in the second, I'd suggest completely replacing the entire 9 entries with either some variation or with the first entry requiring the player to roll until they get a 6 for example, with an increasing change of finding a zombie each time they fail.

The third is the lack of alternate variations and the potential for constant reruns of the same scenes. Some books of this type, for example, offer "If this is the second time you've been here, go to XX instead", honestly instead of filling the book's count of entries with things like the copy-paste cubicle maze (described above) this would have made a sensible addition. This would also prevent fighting the same unique enemies or doing the same unique actions over and over again.

In addition at times you are required to move through a house and return to a down-stairs and up-stairs hallways respectively to get from room to room, it would make more sense for each room to instead allow you to move straight to the entries for the next one, or back up/down stairs instead of forcing you to rerun the hallway entries. The forth is the inclusion of multiple attacker rules, set against every encounter with multiple attackers (except a random change one) resulting in instant death. Honestly I really wanted to try my hand at each of these encounters (and there were quite a few of them) but instead the result was "Oh no a pack of zombies, you're automatically dead." Like the alternative paths option mentioned above, I'd really like to see the option to fight a pack of zombies, without needing a separate GM.

Now I may sound harsh about some of these things, especially considering this was a budget product, but let me assure you that I ultimately loved the book. That said, I also considered the simplicity of the book's format and hope that a future re-release of this product or future products, might take this opinions to heart.

Thanks for reading my review, and don't let my opinions prevent you from giving this a try, because there's gold in them zombie infested hills...

Cheers Rowan/LSWSjr



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Zombie Death Town
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