The undead are scary, nasty creatures, but as the Dead Rising games and various films (Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead) have shown, they’re good for some laughs, too. All Zombies Must Die! follows in that subgenre’s bloody footsteps, taking a half-serious approach to the often grim business of killing ghouls. 

This four-player, top-down shooter plops you in the zombie-infested town of Deadhill, which, like all good slaygrounds, is sprinkled with katanas, assault rifles, laser pistols, and other doom-dealers. Don’t like the weapons on hand? You can craft your own — one of several elements that distinguish the game from the average twin-stick slaughterfest. Beyond simply leveling up, each character also has specific sidequests that sound pretty amusing: Jack’s involve proving they’re all in a videogame, while little green alien Luxo just wants to learn English (from building blocks, comics, and eventually, a copy of The Big Lebowski).

Our hands-on time focused mainly on the action side of this arcade-RPG, though, with four of us annihilating zombies across streets, buildings, and bridges. Despite the colorful, cartoony graphics, gameplay can be wicked-intense: after dozens of undead flooded the area, our foursome became a onesome, with the lone survivor frantically leading enemies around the screen while he searched for weapons and tried to revive the rest of the party. With much effort and a little luck, he prevailed — but ensuring all these zombies die looks like it’ll be harder than we’d anticipated…