Why don't they just move out of town?
I could probably sum up my entire review of this game by simply referring to it as "like the classic Kill Car, but actually fun to play." You basically drive around and run people down, but this game loses the crappy RPG elements of Kill Car in exchange for blood particle physics and blood decals on the car that make it look like you've just strapped nails to your tires and driven through a playground full of ketchup-filled balloons. You would think that's all this game would need, but I wouldn't be wording it this way if the rest of the review was all sunshine and butt kissing.
First off, the game seriously deceives you. The thumbnail and help files make it look like one of those really bad physics side-scrollers where you're supposed to lean back and forth and pray the designers know how to program physics. It's not; it's a top-down game. You might think I'm arguing a minor point, but if I don't know the genre of the game I'm playing until after level one starts, we've got some serious communication problems.
The second and most glaring issue with the game is that it doesn't handle a good concept well. If one non-player character is still alive at the end of the match, it's game over. No retries, no continues, and don't let the "retry" button on the game over screen fool you. This doesn't sound like a huge issue if you know what you're doing, but in practice it means that at the end of every awesome blood-filled combo you do you're going to end up searching for the one or two poor souls who got lost in the suburbs or on top of a floor tile that matches their clothing absolutely perfectly.
Not that the NPCs aren't well-designed; in fact a lot of intricate details in the game seem to be considered. NPCs tend to spawn in areas where it makes sense. For instance, goths spawn near the shopping mall and zombies spawn alongside priests in the cemetery. In addition, fences, walls, outhouses full of poo (yes, really), and other obstacles break, bend, and fall over realistically, but often this becomes a problem. The aforementioned cemetery is placed right next to a large stone wall that only seems to break if you have the momentum of an effing tank, but the NPCs are able to just walk straight through it. Why can priests and zombies climb under a wall that I can't bust through? Who thought that would be a fun game mechanic?
If you thought the outhouses full of poo were way more fun to mess with than the NPCs, don't worry because they feature prominently in two of the three bonus levels I saw, one of which is accessed immediately after the level where you'll find out just how fun the poo is to fling around.
When I say "two of three bonus levels I saw," that's because I couldn't get very far in the game. I couldn't find a certain NPC on the second level which spans the entire city and I ultimately decided I wasn't willing to put up with the hide-and-seek games, indestructible obstacles, and crappy car physics to find how many more inventive parallels the developers decided to draw between blood and feces.
And yes, the car controls do suck. I'm not really sure why, either. First and most obviously it seems that the development team has the hand brake on race cars confused with the actual brake, because all it does is slow you down. I'm no expert, but I'm fairly certain the physics are more intricate than that, or it wouldn't even be a feature in any racing games. The turning is also really wonky. Holding forward and a direction doesn't spin you in a circle; it makes you slowly spiral outward for whatever reason. It's also really easy to think you're sure to hit a target you're going for only to find out you stopped turning too soon or too late and miss by a millimeter, which is just frustrating.
The entire game is just ups and downs, not really that good in a lot of ways but not too bad in a lot of others. It's probably a game you shouldn't try to take too seriously, but don't be surprised if you ragequit more than once. For what it's worth, it is a fun game to play. I just wish it would stop trying to stop me.