This is a game I’ve had for a while but, for some reason, never actually got around to playing until yesterday: Atom Zombie Smasher. Don’t be fooled by the silly-sounding name or what appears at first glance to be a rather simplistic layout: this is a full-blown real-time strategy game, complete with troops, weapons, and evac helicopters to position and (eventually) tech to research. Unlike many strategy games, though, this particular game isn’t about deciding which of your many available units/buildings to build. Rather, it’s about the tactical execution. It’s about “Here’s your stuff and it’s all you’re gonna get for this mission. Good luck.”

The game’s premise is simple: There’s a zombie outbreak going on and it’s your job to evacuate as many civilians to safety as possible. Get any ideas of grandeur out of your head right now: there are going to be casualties and collateral damage. A lot of it. In any given scenario if you manage to rescue about a quarter of a town’s population you’re doing quite well.

This is the map where you’re going to be spending most of your time:

The glowing golden dots are your civilians and the purple ones are the zeds. If a zombie touches a civilian, the civilian turns into a zombie. In other words, if one purple dot touches a clump of golden dots, you can say goodbye to that particular clump. The above screenshot was taken about ten seconds after the start of the mission so the zombies haven’t had much of a chance to do anything yet, but believe me– they will.

The meat of the game is juggling the weapons, troops, and other assorted help that you’re given at the start of the mission. You’ve got various types of explosives (artillery, dynamite, landmines, etc.), you’ve got infantry troops and rooftop snipers, you’ve got barricades and zed bait, and most importantly you’ve got your evac helicopter. Watch out, though: not everything is available for every mission, so you go into each one feeling rather crunched for supplies. But that’s part of the beauty and fun of the whole thing.

One of my favorite parts of the game is that it takes “real-time” to its fullest extent. Your helicopter doesn’t just land the second it tells you to. It takes a while to do so, and then it takes its sweet time loading up survivors, and then it has to fly away offscreen somewhere and unload them before it returns. Likewise, your artillery cannon not only has a giant cooldown, but it doesn’t actually fire until several seconds after you tell it to, so you can’t just fire where the zombies are– you have to think and then fire where the zombies will be. Oh, and buildings (and your own weapons/troops) aren’t invincible to your explosives, by the way. Once I piled a bunch of dynamite around my artillery without thinking and before I knew it, my artillery was out of commission. Hmm.

The game also has an experience system so you can upgrade your stuff, and eventually you’re able to research your own upgrades on top of that.

Another thing the game does really well is give you a sense of things spiraling out of control as the zombies multiply exponentially. What begins as one or two available missions on your map turns into this after about four or five successful ones:

Oh, and did I mention that you’re racing the zombies to a high score and that every single one of those numbers contributes to the zombies’ score? Yeah. Every time you feel good about a successful evacuation mission, you’re taken to the map screen and three or four more infected areas show up and previously infected areas become… well, even more infected.

Losing is fun? Losing is fun.

In short, this is a surprisingly unique and addicting little strategy game that you will easily lose a few hours to. It’s $10 on Steam or $15 elsewhere, which might be a bit high depending on how often you play this sort of game, but I’ve seen it packed in with those pay-what-you-want Humble Bundles a couple of times so it’s well worth the couple of bucks if you ever see it there or otherwise on sale.

Come on, you really can’t go wrong with a game that involves blowing zombies up with dynamite. Right? Right.