For the past couple of years, slaying zombies has taken video games by storm. There’s nothing more satisfying than murdering thousands of zombies in the comfort of your own home.
Twin Blades is a 2-D, side scrolling hack-n-slash where you’re slaying zombies across a number of levels. If that didn’t sell you, you do it as a hot anime chick dressed as a nun who wields a large scythe and a number of firearms.
See you after the break.
Twin Blades is light on the story, but heavy on the action. You start off on Day 1 of zombie fighting with your large scythe and a pistol. As you kill zombies, you’ll pick up their hearts, which are used to upgrade your character’s arsenal. You can choose from a number of arms like a machine gun, flamethrower, and even a ‘Holy Gun’ which can disintegrate some weaker zombies, all of which can be upgraded to deal more damage.
The controls are all on-screen as well as a bar indicating your health and a blue sphere next to it indicating the amount of ammo you have. As you kill Zombies with your melee attacks, your ammo meter fills up with each kill. This keeps the gameplay balanced between attacking with your scythe or your gun so you won’t favor one attack type over the other. Changing between weapons is as simple as swiping up or down on its icon.
As you progress through the multiple levels, the zombies will become more difficult. The variation in enemies is very small, two to be exact: Zombies with and without armor. Zombies also differ in color, which depending on the color, would indicate how difficult they are. Levels are also on the light side as Twin Blades features two levels that are used across multiple sections with different lighting to give off the impression there are more levels.
The art style in Twin Blades is one of the things that drew me to it. Both the main character and zombies are very well animated. Each attack and kill results in zombies either being cut up into pieces, burned to ashes, or zapped to kingdom come. From time to time, blood will splatter onto the screen which makes the zombie-killing experience that much more fulfilling. The background art also has a good amount of detail to it, even though there are two levels.
Twin Blades also has full OpenFeint integration, which gives the game a number of achievements to unlock, leaderboards, as well allowing players to check up on friends who happen to be on the service as well. The service also allows players to chat with one another, or even browse other iPhone games that use the OpenFeint service.
FINAL THOUGHT: Twin Blades doesn’t have much variety in its enemies and levels, but considering it’s a side-scrolling zombie massacre simulator, it does a very good job at what it does. With its gradual increase in difficulty across multiple stages, art style, and selection of upgradable guns, Twin Blades is a title that I could easily recommend if it were for sale at a $2.99 price point. It should be a no-brainer since it really retails for $.99.