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★★★☆☆
This game is all about the three C's: cooperative, cinematic, and casual. Zombicide packs thrills but lacks depth. Fortunately, the thrills are worth it. Probably.
Components: The miniatures look great and of course you get a ton of them. (That said, you don't get enough judging by the game's own standards.) I was especially impressed by the variety of sculpts among the zombies. The survivor miniatures have a good amount of individuality even if none are particularly impressive or interesting. The game tiles are suitably gory and subtly tongue-in-cheek, which is pitch perfect. They are made of thick stock but tend to raise at the edges during gameplay, which is mildly irritating. The zombie and items cards are miniaturized, making shuffling a little harder, but seem endurant. The character cards are printed on flimsier stock that's really not up to the task. Managing your character involves placing item cards and moving fiddly tokens around or (worse) using a plastic clip hooked over the top of the character cards. The clip is hard to use and seems to damage the card. The rest of the tokens are made of the same stock as the tiles. Overall, the components are of very solid quality with the only exception being the character cards, which comes off as cheap and poorly thought-out.
Mechanics: The rules are quick to learn and quicker to master. You can initially take three actions per turn: attacking, movement, activating objectives, trading gear, etc. Guns and certain melee weapons make noise when you use them, which you track with noise tokens, and after the players' turns the zombies all move to the noisiest area of the map unless they have line of sight on survivors. That's basically it. What actually drives this simple pace is the diversity of armament: each weapon has a distinct feel, from the nearly useless frying pan to the deadly Molotov cocktail. I especially loved equipping the chainsaw: roll five dice, all 5s and 6s are hits. How can you not make chainsaw noises while rolling handful after handful of dice, dropping rotters left and right? Searching for these goodies can be problematic: not only do zeds pop up but friendly fire is a certainty in close quarters. Make sure any scavenging survivors are equipped with melee weapons. As you kill the undead, the outbreak becomes more intense with bigger and badder zombies drawn to the action. Your survivors' adrenaline correspondingly rises, giving them extra actions and then various other bonuses. Winning a scenario is a matter of activating objectives (which is kind of boring and should have been dressed up as something more appropriate to the setting), driving the outbreak up to a certain level, escaping the map with certain items you have to search the map for, or some combination. There are also rules for driving in cars and plowing through the horde can be pretty satisfying.
My Gameplay Impressions: Despite having a lot of parts, this is essentially a party game. And it is NOT in any way, shape, or form a survival horror game. With no ammo to conserve, little chance of healing, and limited skill development, Zombicide forgoes the tense moments in favor of over the top fun. Survivors are glass-hammer aficionados of the action movie apocalypse. They can't take much punishment but they can certainly deal it out and smart players will quickly realize how to make the restless dead dance to their tune (quite literally, considering the noise mechanic). While this probably makes Zombicide accessible to non-gamers, the novelty of candystore carnage can wear thin for hobbyists. I found myself ironically thinking, I should be able to do more than play a party game with all these parts. And all the parts don't really make it conducive to actually playing in a party atmosphere, either. In five or six hours' worth of it this past weekend, the game required just enough attention to keep me from socializing but then failed to repay me by holding my attention. Zombicide left me wondering, how am I bored while dual-wielding katanas? Like the cheesy movies that inspire it, this game is best in small doses.
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