In a bid to monetize its user-friendly but financially dragging giant, Sina recently imbued its Weibo microblogging platform with its own currency — the weibi — and games. But are these games actually any good? I dove into a few of them to find out. This is the fourth in a series of reviews of Sina Weibo games.
Now this is what I’m talking about! After reviewing a mountain of games that were overly socialized, overly monetized garbage, finally I’ve found a Weibo game that knows how to keep it simple. In fact, Zombie Treasure is about as simple as a game can get.
Zombie Treasure is all about zombies’ quest for treasure, or something. The game doesn’t bother with any kind of explanation or story. There’s just a circle that looks like a zombie, and you’ve got to roll him to the treasure, avoiding bombs and other pitfalls. The game revolves (get it?) around a simple conceit: the player uses the arrow keys to rotate the world, not the zombie. It’s a little hard to explain, so I made a quick video to demonstrate the gameplay:
It’s not an earth-shatteringly original gameplay mechanic or anything, but it serves well enough, and the increasing difficulty of the levels keeps things from getting boring too fast. That said, this isn’t a game you’re ever going to spend a ton of time with. It doesn’t get any deeper than what you saw above — there’s no multiplayer, no social integration (beyond the ability to quickly post your scores to Weibo and invite friends to play), and — thank god — no begging for money.
It does suffer from a fatal flaw that affects almost all Weibo games: extremely repetitive music and questionable sound choices. If you got sick of the song while watching that video, imagine playing this for ten minutes! Luckily, you can turn the music off quite easily.
Zombie Treasure is instant but fleeting fun, a quick diversion. It’s easy to learn, especially compared to many of the Weibo games I’ve tried, which seem to all incorporate mandatory 30-minute tutorials to teach you how to play games that are needlessly complex and ultimately not fun. Zombie Treasure might be brainless, and it’s far from perfect, but it is fun. And isn’t that the point of games?