On my journey to find new Christmas related AR games for you guys—I came across an iOS ARKit game called Santa VS Zombies AR. Santa VS Zombies AR is a first-person augmented reality shooter in which you play as Santa shooting zombies in order to restore joy and peace before Christmas Eve.
I have to say that straight out front—this is a casual non-thrilling shooter. You got your freezing gun with a limited amount of bullets, which you use to shoot down zombies coming slowly at your location. I was shooting zombies until I ran out of bullets and had nothing left to do but let the zombies eat me for breakfast. The game doesn’t even have a global leaderboard—but to be honest, there isn’t a need for one because the game isn’t challenging at all.
That being said, the visual effects in this game look great. I played it outside my building, but this game will definitely be more fun to play in a snowy environment. The game boasts some really nice snow and ice effects. In fact, when I played this game, I felt like Mei-Ling Zhou, the Climatologist character in Overwatch that can freeze people. You can use your gun to create an ice wall in front of you, but it’s kind of useless because it doesn’t really stop the zombies getting close to me and it wastes ammo. Even if it worked, there is no use for it because there is no challenge so no reason to use it.
It could have been really cool if Blizard were to release a quality Mei Augmented Reality game for iOS using ARKit—this could be really awesome.
The second problem that I had with this game is that it’s laggy as hell. I’ve played it on my 9.7-inch iPad 2017 and it was almost always laggy. The intense visual effects are obviously the reason for that. I don’t know if it will work smoothly on the iPhone X, I don’t have this device so I couldn’t check it out. Anyways, this degrades the overall experience, but because the game is slow-paced, it isn’t a huge issue, but it still an issue.
Here is some gameplay, but just keep in mind that this game would play much better ina snowy environment. If you had a chance to play it in the snow, please share it and tagged me (@ARCriticCom) via Twitter (here is my Twitter page). I really want to see how it looks when played in the snow, Thanks.
Third, the zombies are all the same. There aren’t any levels, no progression or any kind and the game doesn’t feel rewarding whatsoever. There is also a visual bug where the zombies overlap the 3D gun model, which should be fixed Alo the “Tap to Shoot” message is fixed on the screen the entire gameplay session, it should be removed after the game starts. Also, the game isn’t optimized for iPad, you get those black borders around the game.
I can only recommend it if you want to try out an FPS game with some nice snow visual effects that might look nice if you are located in a place where it usually snows at Christmas.
I really liked (I haven’t seen it before in ARKit games) how the visual effects of the ice distorting the real-life scene behind it. It looks like the light is bent as it passes through the ice like it is in real life. The main problem is that this effect cause lags during gameplay.
I guess this game might be fun for kids (rated 9+) who are searching for a casual Christmas-themed shooter to play on their ARKit-compatible iPhone or iPad devices.If you want a great FPS game similar to Santa vs Zombies, try out GhosthuntAR: Survival, or the amazing AiR Monster ARKit games, both will give you a much better gaming experience, although they weren’t designed with a Christmas theme.
You can download the game from the App Store here.