Zombie-defense games have been taken in many different directions, from Call of Duty: Black Ops’ Zombies mode, to the highly addictive and colourfulPlants vs. Zombies. Zombie-defense games have proven that you can take a simple concept and turn it into many different things.

Candygun Games has tried to create a unique zombie-defense experience by making players concentrate on tactical thinking through the use of wooden barricades and traps that slow down and kill zombies while you focus on the objective at hand. Unfortunately, there are a few hiccups along the way that won’t be easy to overcome while playing Dead Block.

I want to like Dead Block. It has charm with its Team Fortress 2-like graphics, its addictive soundtrack and humorous storyline. It’s not that Dead Block is a bad game, in fact I had fun with the title, it’s just that there are some problems with Dead Block that you just can’t not realise, no matter how many wooden blockades you try to cover it up with.

Dead Block is set in the 1950s. Rock ‘n’ Roll has taken the USA by storm and is somehow causing the deceased to spring back up from their graves in search of delicious, juicy brains. In Dead Block, you play in the third-person perspective and start off by controlling Jack Foster, a construction worker, and eventually will gain access to Mike Bacon, an overweight boy scout, and Foxy Jones, a female police officer.

Some levels - or “TV episodes”, as Dead Block is presented as some sort of horror TV series following these three survivors - will see players controlling just one character, while others will have two, and eventually all three will be playable in some levels. 

The main objective in Dead Block consists of either finding three different instrument pieces and playing Rock ‘n’ Roll in a very short Guitar Hero-like fashion, which clears the level of zombies, or killing a set amount of zombies and activating a device known as the “Zomb-O-Matic 9000” which, again, will get rid of all the zombies.

Unlike the type of zombie-defense games that many are familiar with, such as Black Ops’ Zombies mode, Dead Block is not about getting headshots on zombies, it’s about trying to hold them off for as long as possible while you look for those instrument pieces (or, in the case of the two levels involving the Zombo-O-Matic 9000, kill as many as you can while avoiding being overrun). You start off with just the ability to build wooden blockades, and eventually find traps through searching for items.

Everything is looking like Dead Block is going to be a blast to play; you go through the tutorial level as Jack Foster, you find out that you need to actually chop up furniture in order to collect wood to use for barricades, and that you need to search around for “parts” in order to build traps like the Freeze Trap, the Cardboard Box Trap, the Construction Helmet trap, a trap that has a small, chunky-sized nuclear bomb, and so on - everything looks like Dead Block is going to be a fantastic experience with a unique play-style. 

But as you progress through each level; as you continuously mash the “B” button to break furniture searching for parts for traps and the three instrument parts (because Candygun thought it was a good idea to have searchable items spawn after a piece of furniture has been destroyed, leaving players with no option but to destroy everything); as you constantly hit the Left and Right Triggers to remove rubbish off of parts in order to actually retrieve them; as you barricade yourself in certain sections of a level in order to buy yourself some time to destroy more furniture; as you desperately try to control fellow survivors and make sure that they don’t run into zombie hot-spots and get killed, you then begin to realise what a boring, repetitive game Dead Block can be.

Now, each survivor has their pros and cons. Jack Foster, for example, is great with breaking furniture, and is quite good with taking out zombies using his main weapon (when you consider the fact that using a character’s main weapon is actually the least-effective way to kill zombies) but the time he takes to search items is quite slow. The tubby little boy scout can make up for that, as he can search through items extremely quickly, but takes forever to demolish a piece of furniture. Foxy seems to be an all-rounder in a sense, she’s able to search through items faster than Jack, and is able to demolish furniture more quickly than the boy scout.

Candygun Games has made certain traps exclusive to certain characters, basically forcing you eventually to switch between characters, which is annoying when the friendly AI can be horrible at times. Foxy is the only person capable of constructing a bomb trap, for example, and only Jack can build a freeze trap. Also, each character has their own “smart bomb,” as Candygun likes to call them. These “smart bombs” are essentially special abilities that each character possesses. Jack starts off with a simple nail gun, Foxy has a taser, and Mike Bacon has a smelly burger that distracts zombies for a certain amount of time. Each can be upgraded by simply finding them throughout levels to the point where Mike’s simple smelly burger turns into a smelly burger with an explosive in it, and Jack’s nail gun becomes a freeze gun. This certainly does help to make things a bit more interesting and when you include the fact that you can collect coins and use them on Jukeboxes to make a whole room-full of zombies dance themselves to death, you can see why Dead Block has that charm to it, no matter how crazy everything seems to be. 

Dead Block features 10 single-player levels, 8 local co-op levels and as for online multiplayer? Sorry, Candygun didn’t include multiplayer. Which is disappointing, obviously, because Dead Block might have been a bit more fun with such an inclusion and most certainly feels like a game made for more than one person to play.

There really isn’t much to do once you’re done with the rather short campaign. There are three difficulty levels to choose from, and there are targets to reach in each level which award you with medals (silver medals if you’re playing on Normal, and gold medals if you’re playing it on Hard). Even though this might be slightly fun, all you’ll be doing is re-living the annoying, repetitive gameplay that you've just gotten over. Speaking of which, no matter what Candygun Games tries to throw into the mix, whether it’s including fuse boxes that sometimes require you to switch back on if a zombie touches something in a level that causes it to trip, or different zombie-types as you progress through the game, Dead Block can become pretty dead itself.

Dead Block showed a lot of potential during the first few minutes, but after a while it became clear that Candygun Games has failed with some aspects; they were sitting on a great, unique concept but just didn’t know how to properly incorporate the gameplay. If you can get over the repetitive gameplay, then by all means, buy Dead Block for 800 Microsoft Points ($10). 

If, however, you don’t think you’ll be able to overcome the issues in Dead Block, then you might want to keep your money for something else.