Parents' Guide to Zombie Vikings

Players looking for a wacky, fast-moving button masher are bound to enjoy this game. Played solo or co-op with up to four players, Zombie Vikings is entertainingly silly and, though a bit visually chaotic, makes good use of its tongue-in-cheek approach to Norse mythology. The core of the game is frantic melee combat. Each hero has a small set of attacks that are easily made by pressing or holding buttons, and heroes can pick things up and throw them. (The latter can be used to solve puzzles or -- since you can pick up other players' characters -- to annoy other players.) Though clear enough with one player on-screen, combat often becomes visual anarchy with two or more, making it hard to tell who's doing what. On top of that, infrequent save points means repeating levels frequently from the beginning of a stage if you lose a specific fight. Looted gold can be used to buy upgrades, but upgrades are only moderately useful. Violence is constant but is of the comedic, cartoony variety. The best parts of the game are the graphics, which have a kooky, dark, Tim Burton-esque feel to them, and the playful story sequences, which are full of the kind of corny (and sometimes crude) humor that goes over like gangbusters among tweens and younger children. Zombie Vikings is an amusing action game that has a cartoonish, yet crude charm to its gameplay.