Firebies, the New Zombies is an Xbox Live Indie Game developed by Latin Soul Studio for 80 MSP. It was released February 4, 2011

Some games have really great titles and turn into great games (‘Splosion Man, Shadow Complex, Monday Night Combat) but some on the other hand, can have a wonderfully weird title but allude to something else. Firebies, The New Zombies is more the latter than the former with its inventive name but each play-through make it feel lesser despite its price.

Here’s what we liked:

Smooth animations – All the characters have sharp detail; characters smile and and exhibit general shock and awe faces. The main character moves smoothly and the game has a Shank feel if it were more arcade-y and indie-based. The enemies also have a variety of different looks: from giant hot-dogs to regular Firebies as they’re called.

Plenty of moves – The main character has a lot of moves at his disposal when taking out enemies. Lunging into enemies by thrusting your spear to pile-driving the enemies, there is quite a complex amount of combos to defeat the Firebies with.

Here’s what we didn’t like:

Controls – Most of the time playing the game felt like a real chore to get the controls to work. They would have long combos of pressing the X button over and over again but sometimes they just don’t work. While the animations look great, they tend to run very slowly leaving the player often open to attacks.

Frustrating instead of fun – It was hard to even gauge any fun out of the title as it felt too slow to keep up with the manic pace. It just became more frustrating the further I got and didn’t have much to show for it.

In the end, Firebies, the New Zombies doesn’t really offer much to the table. While the graphics look wonderful and are animated nicely, the game just doesn’t work and becomes a frustrating experience. While the 80 MSP tag is nice, you could instead just get I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 for the same price and have more fun. Firebies are indeed not the new zombies as you’d hope.

Score: Skip It