The main thing you do in Zombie Army Trilogy is snipe zombie’s skulls from 80-100 yards away.
Unsurprisingly, that’s a fantastic main thing. The Nazi Zombie Army series began as standalone DLC for Rebellion Developments’ Sniper Elite V2, so it’s fitting that these games are built around picking enemies off from long distances. But, I was a little skeptical that that core action would feel good on Switch. I play Nintendo’s hybrid console almost exclusively in handheld mode, and the stubby thumbsticks built into the JoyCon controllers rarely feel up to the challenge of precision shooting.
But, after playing significant chunks of this collection’s three campaigns and horde mode, I can confidently say that Rebellion’s survival shooter feels right at home on the Switch.
Zombie Army Trilogy has one decaying leg up on the competition because its shooting requires precision, but not twitch skills. Though you’ll need to pull out a shotgun or pistol when the shuffling horde gets close, much of the action in this game has you slowly lining up shots from 100 meters away. As you successfully land hits, a combo meter increases. It’s a solid motivator to keep trying for risky, but rewarding, headshots instead of safe, but less lucrative, body blasts. That matters a lot more in co-op, where your points are ranked against your buddies’ scores, but it’s fun to keep the streak going in solo, too.
There’s a story here that ties each campaign’s five missions together. It involves Hitler unleashing a zombie army against the rest of the world, and I paid zero attention to it. Instead, I found myself pulled forward by the strength of the core loop, not by any desire to see what happened next. The stories that matter in Zombie Army Trilogy are about the moments when you find a really good perch and rain hell on Hitler’s undead pals; when you manage to put a quarter-mile between yourself and the horde and take every single one of them out through a series of ridiculously satisfying headshots; when, through solid sharpshooting, you breeze through a would-be lengthy section by rapidly lodging lead in a dozen decaying craniums.
My main gripe with Zombie Army Trilogy is its lack of visual variety. While there are standout environments — a level set in a train station, which then moves to the train itself, comes to mind — its aesthetic palette is a blur of rubble and burned-out houses. Compared to the wildly different settings Call of Duty’s Zombies mode has served up in recent entries, Zombie Army Trilogy is a bit too same-y. It’s always dark, but never scary. You are almost always standing in the ashes of someone’s home, but the closest thing you’ll find to environmental storytelling are spray-painted arrows pointing you in the right direction.
Issues notwithstanding, Zombie Army Trilogy is a solid take on the formula popularized by series like Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty. The graphics in the Switch version appear to be basically on par with the version released on PS4, Xbox One and PC in 2015. And, despite my problems with the Switch’s JoyCon controllers, playing the game portably feels great.
This series is terrific fun. I skipped Zombie Army 4: Dead War when it released back in February, but Zombie Army Trilogy has been a fantastic commercial.
Zombie Army Trilogy review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher.
Zombie Army Trilogy is available now for Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.