Dead Eyes Review

Developer: LoadComplete
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.2
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

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Overall Rating:

It’s difficult to remember when it all started or how long it’s been going on, but none of that matters now. You’re running out of food and water, and no matter how awful it is out there you can’t just sit around and starve to death. Now you have to abandon the relative safety of your shelter to go look for supplies during a zombie apocalypse - one step at a time.

What we have here is an extremely atmospheric puzzle game. It can be downright spooky with all the creepy ambient music, fog, red-eyed monsters, and eventual mauling. However, if you strip away all the gloom and zombies Dead Eyes is a fairly simple puzzle game. You have to guide your character to the exit of each level by swiping in a given direction, at which point he’ll take a step and all of the walking corpses will follow suit. All you need to do is not get eaten. At first, anyway.

Thankfully the zeds aren’t particularly bright. Some will pace back and forth while others remain stationary and turn 90 degrees with each step. If they spot you they’ll begin shuffling towards your last known location, but sometimes you’ll want to use this to your advantage. For the most part you can ignore them but if you end up stepping into a space they’re occupying (or vice-versa), you’re lunch.

Things get more challenging (and by extension, interesting) once more elements like manholes you can use to jump to different areas or survivors in need of rescuing are introduced. Which is good because Dead Eyes is a bit too simple and easy at first. Of course once it finally starts to ramp up you’ll begin to notice how irritating that brief but consistent pause in-between movements (while you wait for the zombies to shuffle along) can be. Even with the movement speed turned up it’s something of a nuisance - although it’s much more manageable.

Despite being rather simple at its core, it’s still pretty easy to accidentally lose a fair bit of time to Dead Eyes. It’s a cinch to play, eventually becomes difficult to master, and it’s honestly the creepiest puzzle game I’ve played that isn’t Hunie Pop.