Zombieland: Double Tap- Road Trip Game Review

Oh no why did I play this whole thing?

Now you too can fulfill your dreams of shooting zombie-filled toilets for two hours as Fake Emma Stone! Screenshot taken by Alex Rowe.

I’m that guy you know who used to like movie-based video games. Good, bad, questionable cash-in on a license…I bought them all. And finished them all.

But then the industry got over it. The studios that used to make a living on licensed movie titles shifted over to their own original games, or got jobs doing conversion work to less powerful consoles like the Switch, or sometimes faded out of existence entirely.

In the last year or so, something baffling and market-defying happened: movie games started coming back. Not just as fun small mobile diversions either. Real “true” movie games of all budgets and scopes are once again somehow coming out on discs for major platforms.

I wrote a round-up article about this last November, and the title I was most doubtful about was Zombieland: Double Tap- Road Trip, one of the few games I can think of that has both a colon and a hyphen in its title. As of the moment this article goes live, the game is on sale on a variety of platforms for the Lunar New Year, and it’s also one of the current free games in Microsoft’s ongoing Xbox Live Free Play Days promotion.

I downloaded the Xbox version and played the whole thing in a couple of hours. Now, I won’t ever get those hours back.

The game opens on this off-center recreation of the sphere from the Zombieland logo, and some basic voice acting to set up the story. It looks nice enough that I wish the whole game took place on little planets like this one. Screenshot taken by Alex Rowe.

OVERVIEW

Zombieland: Double Tap- Road Trip, which I will now just call Zombieland DTRT, is a top-down perspective dual joystick arcade shooter developed by High Voltage Software for the PC, Xbox, PS4, and Switch. It supports up to four players. It has ten levels, a few side missions, and an endless mode. It features several different playable characters from the film franchise.

And it’s normally $40.

From the start, that price is simply outlandish. I don’t know how the folks at publisher Game Mill reached the ship date and decided, “yes, this is a good value.” The game has an achievement for beating it in less than 5 hours and 45 minutes and I easily earned that without really trying. And it has…