Review: Blood of the Zombies for Android/iOS

As the evenings get darker and the cold wraps its icy fingers around us, there are fewer things better than sipping a cup of hot chocolate while flipping through a gamebook in a cosy chair, especially if you're chucking grenades at hordes of shambling corpses. Tin Man Games have launched their first Fighting Fantasy adaptation for your tablet or smartphone, Blood of the Zombies, which is the latest book in the famous gamebook series penned by Ian Livingstone himself.

In the game you play as a student who is captured and imprisoned by a psychopath called Gingrich Yurr, who has instructed his scientists to create a mutant gene in human blood that will turn ordinary humans into an army of flesh-eating zombies once injected. You're thrown into a grimy cell in a Eastern European castle, guarded by the lumbering Otto. The game instructs you to kill zombies, destroy Yurr and escape. It's a tall order that will require a veritable armoury that would make Frank Castle raise an eyebrow.

Unlike other Fighting Fantasy books Blood of the Zombies only uses stamina as a statistic, leaving your ability to take down zeds in the domain of your weapons. There are three difficulty settings ranging from casual to hardcore depending on how insane you are. This is a tough game, with the possibility of getting killed in the first couple of pages.

The interface, as with all Tin Man Games titles, is simple and intuitive, with the player only needing to select options and roll dice. The artwork and layout is fantastic, and the developers have included some exclusive art that's not in the original book, which is good news for Fighting Fantasy fanatics like myself. The multiple endings will also have players coming back for more in order to get the elusive 'best ending'.

Blood of the Zombies brings the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks lumbering and groaning into the internet generation and with its simple mechanics that work well in app form. It's a fantastic game that presents a fun story, great art and a tonne of re-playability making this a hugely successful first outing for Tin Man and Fighting Fantasy. 

*****