A simple concept greatly enhanced with oodles of variety and replay value, Zombie Party is an enjoyable single and multi-player twin-stick shooter if you're looking for a game that focuses on the fun factor without wasting time on telling a story. Don't be misled by the title, you'll be shooting lots more than just zombies. In fact, zombies will be the least common creature hungry to taste the business end of your assault rifle/teddy bear bomb launcher/upgraded ice-elemental saw blade or whatever your weapon of choice is.

New modes and features have been added to Zombie Party on a regular basis. At the time of writing, you have 4 gameplay modes:

Adventure: Defeat waves of enemies, loot gold and items and purchase stat and equipment upgrades from the pop-up shop in between. Gameplay is paused while shopping and upgrading, allowing you to take a breather and decide where you want to spend your gold. A boss fight will ensue before you can reach the next zone, which is always an interesting, challenging encounter. Following each boss is a new area populated with vastly different enemies and attack patterns.

Arcade: A simplified, shorter mode. Kill 10,000 zombies as quickly as possible without stopping to shop or upgrade. Procure your weapons on site and aim for the highest score.

Dungeon: This is a fun mode that provides a lot of replay value. Venture alone or with friends and/or A.I partners through randomized dungeons featuring environments, enemies and props not seen in regular Adventure mode. Bosses make appearances here too and environments are much larger, so a mini-map is included.

Deathmatch: A barebones deathmatch mode taking place in small, square levels for 2-4 players.

Any gold you don't spend during the course of playing any of the modes above goes into a gold pot. These excess funds can be used to purchase new characters, permanent stat upgrades and best of all: hats! There's a decent incentive to collect gold for unlockables, especially new characters because they begin gameplay with a super weapon equipped. Personally speaking, the funny hats alone had me chasing extra gold ...

Any discussion about Zombie Party would be remiss to omit the huge amount of upgrades and weapons on offer. Each base weapon type can be upgraded to a higher tier in the shops, changing their stats and projectile types and eventually evolving into ridiculous super weapons. Shotguns become blunderbusses and fish launchers and sub-machine guns become death scythes and pulse cannons, to name but a few. On top of that, weapons level up with use and stat upgrades such as health and fire rate can be purchased for your characters. Furthermore, specials artifacts can be found to modify your weapons e.g. swap regular bullets out for lasers. Runes are automatically equipped when dropped, up to maximum of three interchangeable runes. Similar to artifacts, they add new effects which are often elemental in nature. Party hats are yet another type of item occasionally dropped which your character will automatically equip and be provided with temporary, unique buffs such as spinning fire or laser aura-type defenses.

The inclusion of A.I bots is a great addition. Empty player slots can optionally be filled with A.I bots in any of the 4 game modes. They will collect weapons and upgrades, rarely take their fingers off the trigger and even revive you when you're downed. Letting them tag along with you can also allow you to see what super weapons are carried by the locked characters you have not purchased yet. You may even unexpectedly bump into random A.I buddies who will fight on your side while playing solo. I experienced a bit of framerate slowdown when including bots in Dungeon and Deathmatch modes, but the developer has been putting out patches and updates since the game began early access so I would be confident that a fix is on the way if this issue is not exclusive to my experiences. All-in-all, Zombie Party is a simple, colorful, fun to play twin-stick shooter with plenty of variety for 1-4 players.

UPDATE: Since reviewing Zombie Party 3 months ago, lone wolf developer Ben James has pumped out a plethora of updates, changes and new additions, more than enough to warrant a second look! Black borders are now gone thanks to the introduction of widescreen mode and the HUD areas have been cleaned up reduced in size, resulting in a a more spacious action area on screen. New characters and new weapons await you too, but the most significant change is the addition of online play across all game modes for up to 4 players. This is a very welcome addition because Zombie Party is best enjoyed with a few like-minded friends decked out with upgraded characters, super weapons and silly hats of choice, fighting over gold and working together to take down bosses. At the moment it's best to consider this purely as a means for you and your friends to take your local co-op games online, because you might not find any servers waiting to be joined. By the by, those bosses have since been equipped with vocal cords, but having not yet grasped the art of proper diction, they are probably unaware that they incoherently grumble their threats of impending doom. It's quite endearing! With the promise of yet more updates and improvements to come, Zombie Party is definitely worth checking out.