We tried for brains next door. Everyone there's a string theorist.
I'll be blunt: I hate the zombie genre. It’s been done to death not only in games, but in every other form of media. So I was perfectly prepared to ignore Battleground Z as yet another zombie game that isn't the Left 4 Dead 2 GOTY edition. What I found was a shockingly entertaining action game that uses StreetPass profiles in hilarious and interesting ways.
Once you get out of the intro level, your Mii is set into various levels focused around clearing the area of zombies and guiding other Miis to tasks, such as finding items or defending a key objective. Your weapons are based on the hobbies of the Miis you encounter, which leads to you bashing zombies in with a Wii Remote or a bowling ball. Holding down the A button will unleash a super movie on the zombies such as unleashing a dragon from a pop-up book or using your disco ball to defeat your enemies with the power of dance. Each weapon has a life bar, and once all the weapons run out you have the option to restart.
There's something immensely satisfying about bashing zombies to death, and it's fun to see just what the various hobbies turn into. Although you can pull in a full set of survivors, the games are usually balanced enough to only need to pull in one or two at a time. The exception is the boss battles, since each boss will do at least half of a weapon's life bar and their hitboxes are far larger than yours. If you're pulling in a full slate of survivors for boss fights you can usually wear them out through attrition. Thankfully, the boss levels are only a small percentage of the levels in the game and the rest of the levels are fun enough. Each level has its own set of bonus objectives, so you'll be replaying often to try and find how to get the rare zombies to appear so you can unlock special arena levels.
Given the subject matter, I almost set this one aside to focus on the fishing Streetpass game. But this titles' sheer amount of ridiculousness left me happy enough that I bought in. A lot of sins are forgiven when you're wasting slime-spitting zombies by doing Link's spinning slash with the Wii Remote to save a Mii-style puppy!
