Review: Zombies, Run!

Review by Daniel Nenadovic

In Episode 1 - Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut Part 1, I briefly mentioned Zombies, Run! It is an iOS fitness app that ties zombies together with exercise. Most of that works well. But the game - I think it's fair to call it a game - is just short of being perfect for what it is.

Zombies, Run! functions by treating you as Runner 5. While you're walking or running, the game puts you in the role of one of Abel Township's 'runners' whose jobs involve carrying out various vital tasks that involve old-fashioned foot travel, of which there are many considering the zombie apocalypse situation. You'll run to notify nearby towns of incoming zombie hordes, walk to find a lost child, and move to escape swarms of zombies that have caught your scent. 

During exercise, the game plays out entirely through your headphones with fantastic voice-overs and sound effects, so you won't be distracted fumbling with your iOS device (at least not on the game's account). These audio sequences are interspersed around music tracks from your playlist every five or ten minutes, so you'll get an audio sequence, a song or two, another audio sequence, more songs, etc. until you've finished the mission. It's important to note that the game takes place in Britain or something, so everybody has awesome British accents. As Runner 5, you will collect various items and supplies during travel missions, but even here the game requires no distracting input from you. Instead, a computerized voice simply announces the collection of a new item.

That computerized voice is the game's biggest - and possibly only - problem. It's not very clear and speaks far too quickly, so sometimes you'll have no idea what it is your character picked up until you arrive home and look at your inventory on the screen. The voice is jarring and annoyingly unclear; that's also forgivable, but it's the one notch that keeps this game from perfection in my eyes.

In this way, Zombies, Run! is not so much a traditional game as it is a type of ARG, and even then its interactivity during exercise is not that high. The voice-overs are more like stories that play out around you. If you have Zombie Chases enabled, the game will occasionally tell you that you need to speed up for a while, which does increase interactivity and serves as a fun form of interval training.

Most missions will run you 30 minutes or so. After that, the game kicks into radio mode, which is entertaining on its own. While the music it plays is still your own playlist, those tracks are interrupted by two radio personalities with humorous and insightful banter that keeps you in the mindset of a zombie apocalypse survivor for the remainder of your walk or run.

It's after you're back home cooling off that Zombies, Run! becomes more of a traditional game. You'll get to manage the items and supplies you've collected through a simple interface and use those supplies to upgrade Abel Township's facilities, which can unlock new missions. Codex entries unlock during missions and can also make for some fun at-home reading to keep yourself absorbed in the world of the game. Some of them also encourage ARG-type interactions. So far, I've been linked to Twitter accounts and even prompted to e-mail a shady (fictional) terrorist organization who might know something about the zombie incident that started it all.

There are some glaring omissions. I've yet to find a map of my real-life route anywhere in the app and it doesn't provide much information on the actual walk or run itself beyond pace and total distance covered, so if you're looking for a fitness app with detailed information on your actual exercise you may want to look elsewhere.

However, if you're looking to make your runs or walks more fun and exciting, you can scarcely do better than Zombies, Run! It's a bit pricey for the App Store, coming in at $7.99, and tragically there is no 'lite' trial version to try before you buy, but eight bucks seems like a small price to pay for augmenting exercise with a zombie game. I highly recommend that you check out Zombies, Run!