Mobile Game of the Week - World War Z

Key Features

• Developer - Paramount Digital Entertainment

• Platforms - iOS, Android

• Device tested - iPhone 4

• Price - 69p

World War Z

World War Z isn't perfect. It's a hefty app, the kind that makes your iPhone heat up and has the occasional framerate issues, and it pushes in-app purchases down your throat constantly. But if you can look past these problems, World War Z's a neat little first-person shooter complete with the added bonus that it lets you pretend to be Brad Pitt. It's worth a try.

You know the drill by now: Zombies, apocalypse, family to save, etc. Based on the recently released film rather than the book (because we imagine it's hard to make a game about interviewing people in cafes) World War Z sees you trotting from one zombie-infested country to another, shooting the undead with guns and scrounging for information on what exactly the ruddy hell is going on.

Those are the best bits, actually. World War Z's bread and butter is shooting, which is handled on-rails a la Time Crisis, but the most interesting parts are the ones with no guns at all, where you're rifling through filing cabinets or hacking emails looking for info on how to stop the zombies for good. Seriously. World War Z, as in, the premise, is smarter than the average zombie story because it's all about information gathering, about research. The original book was inspired by Studs Turkel's The Good War, an after-action, oral history of World War II. It's more about journalism and ratification that it is about exploding heads - it's great World War Z, the game, tries to grasp that.

Shooting

Though we should also point out it has lots of guns in it, and blood, and zombies. The shooting scenes often involve entire hordes of the undead, and they're the running, shrieking, nasty kind, not the shambling, stupid, funny kind. You have to swipe and tap your iPhone screen incredibly quickly if you want to stay un-undead, so aside from the murky intelligence gathering stuff, there are plenty of gibs as well.

World War Z's a solid tie-in that at least makes some effort to capture its source material. Its App Store listing boasts "chilling atmosphere" as a selling point, though we're not sure about that - the whole game is a bit too loud and janky to really scare you a great deal. Nevertheless, we enjoyed World War Z. If you didn't think the film was much cop and you can't be bothered to read, try this out.