Zombie Rollerz: The Last Ship from indie studio Zing Games will be familiar to fans of the
Zombie Rollerz: The Last Ship from indie studio Zing Games will be familiar to fans of the burgeoning roguelike/bullet hell/idle game subgenre that Vampire Survivors helped popularize. I began my demo at PAX East with just a vehicle, isolated and exposed in a huge expanse of sand. Soon, little green zombies were running after me. I could run them over with my monster truck/tank/thing, but each collision did damage to my vehicle. Surely there’s a better way, I thought.
Thankfully, there is. I soon unlocked a machine gun, but it didn't equip automatically. Instead, I needed to open up a menu, which revealed that I had six available slots on my monster trank. I decided to place it on the front, and as I headed back to the desert battleground, I could now mow the zombies down, collecting all sorts of resources as I plowed through their corpses. Just like in Vampire Survivors, I didn't need to pull a trigger or tap a button. My only concerns were positioning my vehicle to do maximum damage, and evading the more dangerous types of zombies I soon began to encounter, like the one that chucked an explosive at my grill.
In short order I’d filled up the rest of the slots, protecting the trank from all angles. Most of the turrets I unlocked had different functions. One fired a bomb that arced out beyond the frontline zombies to take a chunk out of the middle of the horde with an AOE attack. I got a flamethrower and a water gun, too. And, though not a turret, I also unlocked a helpful modifier that made the zombies dance. They were easier to kill while they were in their reverie, but the ability had a lengthy cooldown. Best to save the next dance.
Soon, a storm descended on the desert. Though I don't fully understand the logic behind this, it caused a new mob of zombies to appear, swamping my vehicle. Zing Games' co-founder and creative director Ding Ye says this is a skill check to make sure players are ready for the challenge aheadl. I was, at least this time around. I made it through the first storm and got back to attacking zombie encampments to get gold and lumber, which I could spend on upgrades for my existing turrets, plus build more turrets and unlock new modifiers.
Speaking of lumber, Ye says that there are several other biomes where players will be able to run over the undead. Most interesting is a forest. While the desert begins as an open-ended waste, players will need to carve their way through the woods, making a path as they go. "[The biomes] don't just look different, they affect gameplay," Ye says. "For example, you can shoot and knock down trees." That will net you boons. There will also be a lava biome, where the rise and fall of the magma determines the size of the playspace.
As familiar as this kind of game has become in a few short years, it's something very new for Zing Games, a four-person studio mostly based in Naperville, Illinois. The indie studio's previous game, Zombie Rollerz: Pinball Heroes was, you guessed it, a pinball game. But Ye tells me that the studio wants each game in the series to expand into a different genre, while nodding to elements that fans may recognize. The monster trank, Ye says, was in Pinball Heroes, too, but in that game you only saw the front.
Zombie Rollers: The Last Ship has been in development since late 2022. Ye says that Zing Games is targeting a 2025 release on Steam, with hopes of bringing the game to Switch and other consoles.
