Parents' Guide to Age of Z Origins

Though it's a fairly typical strategy, world building, tower defense mash-up, it's also a rather solid and engaging one, even if it is heavy on the ads. In Age of Z Origins, what's left of the human race lives in a walled city. But thanks to constant zombie attacks, as well as general wear and tear, the city is in need of repair. Using the resources you get from playing, you have to decide what buildings and structures will get fixed or even upgraded, and which will just have to wait. You also have to pick and place stationary weapon systems to stop the hordes of zombies walking down the road towards town, while also sending soldiers out to fight groups of zombies who are just hanging out but look like they're up to no good.

As strategy games with elements of building and defense go, this is fairly standard. The touch screen controls work the same here as they do in other games, and there's, of course, a lot of waiting for things to get built... unless you want to spend in-game money so you don't have to wait. It's also got a lot of deep, complicated systems to understand. As a result, fans of similar games won't find anything terribly inventive about it, but nothing terrible either. Except maybe how it runs ads along the bottom of the screen when you're on most of the menus. Sure, they're just ads for things you can buy from this game's store -- packs of supplies, currency, and speed up tokens -- but it's still a bit much after a while. Still if you love planning and killing zombies more than you hate crass commercialism or simple gameplay, you'll find Age of Z Origins to be as strategically compelling as other games with the same basic mechanics.