Zombie games have taught us how to fight back against an undead plague should it ever become a reality. After playing Infect Them All (formerly Infection:Zombies), we think it may be more fun to become a zombie instead.
Infect Them All is all about creating a chain reaction of undead creatures by biting humans. Once they turn green, they’ll succumb to the virus and help you spread it around.
You start out with the easy bait, blond-haired girls, and eventually learn to overtake each of the 20 unique human varieties. Some require multiple bites to turn, while others have weapons such as guns that allow them to attack from a distance, or chainsaws that can inflict massive damage.
In order to stay alive, you must keep your constantly decreasing health bar up by biting as many humans as possible. You’ll also need to stay away from enemies with anger signs over their heads, as they will attack you. The strategy is to leave these humans for your newly-turned zombie minions to chow down on. If your health bar runs out before every human in the level has become infected, you’ll need to start over.
Between levels, you can use money earned from combos and infecting humans in the upgrade shop. Here you can improve nearly every aspect of your zombie, such as your speed, health bar, and ability to infect humans quickly.
You’ll start off with just one zombie available, but can unlock two more, which are faster and more powerful. There are also two other game modes that can be unlocked by beating the campaign: a survival mode where you must last as long as possible, and “blitz mode,” which is timed. We’d rather these were unlocked from the get-go, since the latter levels of the campaign can be tricky. OpenFeint provides high scores and achievements for all three modes.
As fun as Infect Them All can be, it does grow tedious over time. Even with all the upgrades, multiple modes, and different zombies, the core gameplay mechanic never really changes. However, it certainly gives us a fresh and original twist to zombie games. Who doesn’t have spontaneous cravings for brains?