Global Outbreak

An action game set on where you are

It must be pretty hard for any developer nowadays to actually innovate either the z-genre or action gaming. However, here and there appears someone with a great idea, usually making a new use of a feature of our devices used for another thing. In this case, Red Robot Labs places your position thanks to your GPS to somehow personalize your gaming experience. It's nice when you can read "outbreak has spread to Hinsdale County, CO". Unfortunately, it doesn't run over G's Maps, but we hope it's something that will come someday.

In Global Outbreak, you play the role of a mercenary leader working for a private security corporation whose resemblance to Blackwater is purely coincidential. Anyway, an infection is spreading and turning people into brainless zombies and governments are unable to fence it off, so you have been called to clean up the mess and earn some money by the way.

Surprisingly, game's only 80 Mb and runs on any toaster with Android 2.0 or higher. Graphics are nice and zoominable, sound effects are appropriate, music sounds minimal yet eerie and native controls for touchscreens work fine, at least where you are in the middle of the action. Gameplay can be summarized in: select a ground team, clean the zone, call the chopper, spend money to build and place depots, purchase new helicopters and weapons, recruit new mercenaries. Sounds great, isn't it?

Last but not least, learning and difficulty curves are right enough to allow epic runaways from hot zones and AI's pretty smart, so you can trust your mates won't throw themselves into a certain death when you tap on a spot behind a corner or whatever. Indeed, it's nice to see how they keep shooting down enemies while they retreat to a barricade or near a defense turret. On the other hand, it's a game pretty hard to quit off, to the point of having to leave to the homescreen and manually force close it.

Although we'd like there were any customization options for our soldiers, GPS could be exploited far more and it'd be great to watch some voiced cutscenes, in short it is an awesome, free to play game. There's intense action, a pinch of strategy and a bunch of growling zombies. Who's in?