Ultimate Zombie Defense – PS5 Review

Ultimate Zombie Defense is a top-down twin-stick shooter, with some tower defense elements, from Belfast-based studio Terror Dog.  And this is a really strange game.  Not so much because of the mechanics of it, this sort of thing has been done before in games like #killallzombies, but more because of basically every design choice that the developers made.

There isn’t much of a story here.  Your once quiet city has been overrun with zombies and, according to the blurb, you and your friends have only one mission:  locate and destroy the source of the infection.  Don’t get hung up on any of that.

When you start the game you’re offered a choice of three locations, three difficulty levels and eight characters to play as (based on four classes).  You’re best off picking the first location, The Bridge, as it’s the easiest to defend, the more straightforward to build on and the most fun.  One thing you won’t find in there is any kind of co-op.  Yep, the ‘four-player online co-op’ that the PC gamers get isn’t available here at all.  We couldn’t see any local co-op options either which is pretty shoddy given that the game sort of needs it.  You can write off playing as the Medic class right away, there’s no point to it.

Anyway, when you get into the game proper you’ll be dropped in the middle of the map and there are a few zombies around to take out.  So, based on EVERY TWIN-STICK SHOOTER EVER, you’ll aim your left stick, hit R2 and start killing them.  Right?  No.  For some sick reason the game doesn’t use traditional twin-stick controls.  Instead, your right stick moves an on-screen cursor that you shoot at.  It’s such a clumsy, awful and frankly stupid way of doing things that it absolutely beggars belief.

So that takes some getting used to and, let’s be real, will probably be a contributing reason to you dying even days after you’ve gotten used to it because when you’re being chased down by a boss, it’s just super inefficient to aim that way.  It’s not game-breaking but it’s game-spoiling for sure.

Anyway, after a bit of adjusting, you’ll take out the zombies in that first wave and then the game gives you a respite period where you then get to upgrade your defences (we’re English by the way) a bit.  Actually, you’ll probably want to build up your cash for three or four rounds but when you’re ready to spend you can do it two ways.  The first is to upgrade your weapons.  You start with a pretty weak pistol and you can upgrade that somewhat (extra damage, ammo capacity, reload speed).  Or you can buy a Desert Eagle if you want to stick to shitty weapons.  More likely you’ll want to buy some sort of rifle or shotgun (a mistake you’ll only make once).

The other way to spend your cash is much more important.  You can build defences.  These can be obstacles – various walls, fences and traps – or turrets (manned or automated).  These are critical to doing well in the game, because a) they’re quite useful and b) you’ll still be struggling to manually shoot anything because of those controls.  But building up a decent base is actually quite good fun and certainly the best part of Ultimate Zombie Defense.

These structures can be destroyed, so there’s a degree of upkeep required.  And this gets worse when a boss shows up as they get you out of your comfort zone pretty quickly.  Eventually it’ll be a boss that kills you probably but until then you’ll just be working through wave after wave of zombies.  Remember when we said don’t get hung up on the plot?  You won’t be locating and destroying the source of the infection.  You’ll just be staying in a small area, killing zombies until they overpower you.

And that’s it really.  With no endgame, all there is to do is play each of the three levels until you’re bored of it.  Even the trophy set doesn’t help as you’ll be maxing this out in under an hour (there’s no Platinum here either which seems particularly lazy in 2025).  There aren’t even that many defence structures to experiment with.   It’s like the game is just completely undeveloped and given that the controls are based on playing on PC and the co-op didn’t even make it across to this version.   There’s a PC sequel to the game though, so maybe we’ll get that and it’ll fill in some of these gaps.

The other thing about the game is the presentation.  From misspelled words in the menu to the overly dark lighting, there’s not much to like.  The animation isn’t great and the camera is often unhelpful.  Some of the boss designs are okay but that’s about it.

Ultimately this is one of those games where you get a bit of enjoyment from it but are then left with a lot of questions as to why they made the choices they made.  Why are the controls so uniquely awful?  Why didn’t the co-op make it across?  Why is the first of the three levels the only enjoyable one?  Why does the gameplay not match the story?  Also, why is the DLC level from the PC version not available?  Like, this is the absolute worst version of a pretty average game.  That’s odd, right?