Dustoff Z [Xbox]
Invictus Games Ltd’s Dustoff Z is a fun, arcade-style game that has you flying back and forth across zombie-infested areas to collect supplies, rescue survivors and take out huge zombie bosses. It’s a fairly straightforward fetch-quest style game, where each level revolves around you rescuing survivors as well as collecting supplies, escorting convoys and defending your camp within a time limit. It is very mobile-game-esque in its side-scrolling playstyle, which makes sense as the previous Dustoff titles (which I’ve never played) were exactly that. Each level can be set at one of three difficulty settings, with the aim being to work your way through each of them to achieve the three-star rating, by completing all tasks within the time limit.
You start off with a fairly weak, basic helicopter that has been crudely hammered and welded together from scrap materials. Over time you will unlock further vehicles, which can be upgraded and customised from your base. You can also hire the survivors you rescue to become shooters, each with their own unique weapons, and you can further upgrade their different stats to improve how well they’ll defend you during your missions. You can perfect your team to have the best people available for each run, upgrading their stats and customising their appearance, as well as choosing which weapon and aircraft you wish to use to increase your odds of succeeding. Figuring out which people and which chopper is the best option for every run is crucial, with runs being made monumentally more difficult by making a poor choice when setting up.
Visually, it has quite a blocky, polygonal appearance, with simple backgrounds that fade out into the mist, and plenty of visible destruction and devastation from the apocalypse and zombie uprising. Zombies burst into piles of green goo upon death, which makes for a pretty satisfying effect when you annihilate a bunch of them at once. The zombies here are quite different to the usual zombie lore, with them having the ability to jump really high. Like, way too high. I quickly learned my lesson about flying low to the ground, as I thought I’d be safe there, but nonono, these zombies quickly leapt from all angles and brought my poor helicopter to the ground in flames.
The music is fairly generic, with a country-rock/redneck vibe that becomes quite repetitive, and whilst it’s not bad, it’s not really anything special either. The voiceover however, is a weird mix of enjoyable and god-awful, with little quips here and there explaining what to do and where to go, but the constant repetition of “Enemy spotted!” and “Enemy engaged!” is enough to drive anyone bonkers. The game is filled with various references, such as shooters available to be hired with names such as Tallahassee (Zombieland) and Zombinator (Terminator), and as I’ve said before - I always appreciate a good reference.
Controls are straightforward enough, with the left stick controlling your motion - which is limited to moving left and right along the route, and up and down to increase or decrease height to pass over or under obstacles. Shooting enemies is done by your shooter on board, so all you need to do is hold in the Right Trigger and they’ll shoot whenever zombies are near. You have limited ammo (although this can be replenished at Save Points, or by pickups throughout the level), so you need to try to bear this in mind and save your ammo for the big guys. Sometimes the game feels unfair, with areas of the map clipping your vehicle unnecessarily or items that need to be picked up being stuck under bits of rubble - this can leave you feeling very frustrated as it wastes important seconds from your timer, and that could be all that stops you from completing a task successfully. We also frequently ran into issues where survivors, after clearing the way and landing for them to board the helicopter, just would not move. They’d sometimes get up after a bit of wiggling around, but again this wastes precious seconds, and puts you in jeopardy of zombies piling on and destroying your chopper, and other times we’d need to restart the level to try again - which is definitely pretty annoying.
At £12.49 on the Xbox Store, it comes right in at that value-for-money sweet spot, as it gives you a good few hours of enjoyable content, with plenty of replayability in its arcade-style format and unlockables to be gained. You have access to the Alman-O-Tronic, which keeps track of all of the enemies as well as collectibles that can be unlocked, and this is quite beneficial to see what you’ve done, and it’s cool to see your progress like this. To unlock the last mission (and helicopter) you’ll need to master everything in the Alman-O-Tronic - such as getting a certain number of kills of each zombie type (aka - ‘fully analysing’ them), etc. which puts this to good use. There are daily missions available that allow you to gain extra coins to spend on various upgrades, but you get enough of each type of in-game currency (gear, beans and coins) throughout the levels, so these aren’t necessary to grind - they’re just there for a bit of an added bonus. It definitely has some issues here and there wherein you feel totally robbed of a successful run through no fault of your own, which did put a dampener on things a little bit - but for all the winning runs (and failures, when self-imposed), we still had a fair bit of fun.
In the end, we decided to give Dustoff Z the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.
Have you playe Dustoff Z yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Invictus Games Ltd for the Dustoff Z Xbox review code!
