Title: Massive Cleavage vs Zombies
Developer: Awesome Enterprises
Game Type: PlayStation Mobile
Download: 230 MB
NA Availability: Digital Download 
EU Availability: Digital Download
PSTV Support: No

There are a lot of games out in the console and mobile worlds both.  Among those games, there are some games that are not politically correct.  Many games are out there, especially in the indie world, which are full of stereotypes for the sake of having the stereotypes.  Can you think of one game like this?  I’m sure the first game series that you would think of in this manner is the infamous Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Aside from GTA, there are some smaller games that throw stereotypes and jabs at various minorities because they are able.  GTA gets a lot of criticism from the masses, but when you’re a small indie game that many don’t even know of, you’re not going to be in a whole lot of areas for criticism.  There are many titles in this area as well, though you may not have seen or played any of them as of yet.

Consider today the first day PS Vita Reviews has covered one such game that is made natively for the PS Vita.  On the PlayStation Mobile platform, I took a look through the PSM store and bought a game solely because the title was too funny not to.  A recent PSM release that is also available on other systems, here is my official review of Massive Cleavage vs Zombies!

Story

The story of this game takes place in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.  Little is known about the state of the world, but that there are hordes of zombies around in the form of adults, children, as well as animals.  In this world, there is a group of people whom sends a lone, busty blonde woman out in the chaos of the world.  This special mission is to acquire a special bottle of BBQ sauce.

As you can imagine, the game’s story is very tongue-in-cheek and isn’t to be taken seriously.  The game’s story could also be seen as offensive, as there are a lot of racial and sexist stereotypes, other than the fact that you’re controlling a barefoot busty blonde that is hacking her way through the world with a meat cleaver.  There are many mentions about Mexicans, men being rapists, blondes being helpless and stupid and much more.  If you’ve got a sensitive heart to such issues, the story could be deemed offensive to you.

Gameplay

Massive Cleavage vs Zombies is a 2D hack n slash game that has you fending off against waves of the undead as you go from stage to stage in the storyline.  Some people think it’s more of a beat-em-up.  Since you’re constantly slashing with the meat cleaver, though, I refer to it as a hack n slash action game.

As you go into the game, you will be taken straight into the story campaign.  Throughout the storyline, you will be going from scenes to quick-time-events to stages where you’ll be fighting off hordes of zombies in a 2D environment.  It has a few elements to it, but you will mostly be using your time in the game in the stages and fighting off zombies coming towards you from both the left and the right.

The scenes and quick-time events also progress fairly quickly.  The scenes have dialogue, but are not voiced.  A big thing is about the quick-time events, which is something I’ve never seen in a PS Mobile title before.  Every so often, a scene will show a turn for the worse, and you’ll have to follow button prompts in order to progress.  Otherwise, you’ll start the scenes over until you get it right.  The quick-time events are effective, but they’re challenging.  You have very little time for each one and they progress to another very quickly.  You’ll need quick reflexes to get past some of them.  I wasn’t able to do any of them perfect my first try.

Once you get past the scenes, you’ll be taken to a stage.  This is shown in the form of a 2D environment.  Your character is at the middle of the stage and zombies will come at you from both the left and right.  Your job will be to use two types of attacks with your meat cleaver to defeat enemies until the stage ends.  You won’t need to defeat all enemies that appear, but just keep fighting off waves of enemies until the stage ends and you’re taken to another story scene.

The big trick to the game is that there are two different types of attacks that must be used for different types of enemies.  You have a high attack and low attack.  Certain enemies can only be defeated by using high attacks and the same for low attacks.  If you use a high attack on an enemy crawling on the ground, nothing will happen but them getting closer and starting to attack you.

High reflexes are also required for these sequences.  In the latter half of the game, enemies will come at you faster and in much greater numbers, requiring you to constantly be changing what you’re doing to keep yourself from getting overrun.  Miss just one enemy and they’ll be on you and your health will quickly fall down, so staying on top of things is very important.

The biggest thing about this gameplay style is that the game gets repetitive overtime.  While the tension does rise with bigger waves of enemies, you’re essentially just doing the same thing over and over again.  Even though the game’s 17 stages can be cleared in 1-2 hours, the game felt very repetitive and didn’t try much else by the time the game ended, aside from a couple different enemy types and adding more enemies to deal with in the stages you’re forced into.

Controls

Controlling this game isn’t going to be a very hard feat.  The first thing you’ll want to know is that there aren’t any touch controls, and the game cannot be played on the PlayStation TV.  You’ll only be using some of the buttons on the Vita as you play through the game, so you won’t have to worry about having a technical and confusing control scheme.

Going through the menus is done with the D-Pad, and going through the dialogue in scenes is done with the X and Circle buttons.  The other face buttons are also used in scenes when the quick-time events come into play.  When you’re in combat, though, you’ll be using either the D-Pad or Left Analog Stick to mean.  Along with this, the four face buttons will be used for the various types of attacks you can use.  Triangle and Circle can be used for high attacks, whereas Square and X can be used for low attacks.

All in all, it’s a pretty simple control scheme to use, and the tutorial level does a good job at explaining the combat to you.

Presentation

The visual presentation of the game looks good for what it is.  It incorporates cell-shaded character models.  There are a few inconsistencies to be seen, but the game does a nice job at showcasing 3D-looking models in a 2D game.

There are two things to note about the presentation, though.  The first is the amount of gore in the game.  Like many horror movies of late, the game felt like it was trying too hard to be overly violent.  Just as its story can be seen as offensive, so can fighting and seeing beheaded dog and human corpses lining a stage by the time you finish a stage.  Zombie or not, seeing your character constantly chopping off dog heads isn’t a pretty sight.

The other thing to note is that the tutorial level has a huge amount of technical problems associated with it.  When you go through the tutorial and more than a couple enemies are on stage at once, the frame-rate plummets.  It gets to the point where you can barely even see what’s going on, with frames moving once every couple seconds, to a game-breaking point.  Oddly enough, every other stage runs fine and has a lot more enemies than the tutorial stage.