We thought we'd burnt out completely on the so-called "tycoon" style of game, until we saw Zombie Tycoon. It's a neat twist. Being a tycoon over things like railroads and theme parks now looks pretty bland, compared to ruling over an army of brain-hungry, blood-thirsty undead. The best part of the game is, without a doubt, its curb appeal, those first impressions you get when booting it up the first few times. A top-down perspective rules most of the time, but you can draw the camera down to almost street level. There's a map showing all important locations in each level, including the critical ones you'll need to complete that particular challenge. The camera can be moved quickly to visually sync with one of your zombie squads or groups, helping to keep your bearing once you reach stages where it is possible and desirable to deploy small groups to different locations. The zombies themselves end up dressed in a wild assortment of clothing, scavenged from slain townspeople and destroyed buildings. The range of weirdness is impossible to describe, but Zombie Tycoon makes equipping your squads as fun as watching them go to work.

The animated cut-scenes are cute and brief, telling the story of why and how you end up controlling all these zombies, anyway. Music and sound effects throughout the game keep the theme alive, and it is especially amusing to meet the denizens of the towns you ransack. Various types are seen again and again, so after some practice, you'll come to recognize cops in their donut shops, chainsaw-wielding vigilantes, and bozo businessmen just waiting to be eviscerated, all from a top-down perspective. We found it hard at times to differentiate between our zombie squads, based solely on the health bars that match one of the three squad colors. Zooming makes this obvious, but there should have been some better HUD-style indicators for what squad you happened to be viewing at any time. Other small annoyances include a weak system for indicating where in town you should be going, and reminders on what to do next. Zombie Tycoon has a bad habit of hiding critical gameplay objects away, letting you know only after you've failed the level that you needed them.

The difference between your typical sim game and the tycoon variant is that the latter involves some very specific goals. It's not enough to build, you've gotta build with a purpose, darn it! This time, the purpose is world domination, as you play the role of a mad scientist in charge of deploying zombies throughout populated areas, for fun and profit. The notion of world domination is certainly tossed out there, but intermediate goals tend to be quite simple: Destroy everything in your path. Building on the ideas in previous tycoon games, Zombie Tycoon is a solid entry in the Minis series of games for PSP and PSPgo that Sony is banking on to breath new life into a system that is sorely lacking for new quality entertainment. Especially considering the fact that games like Zombie Tycoon are suited to a small budget and a small memory card, it's hard to go wrong. Controlling armies of the undead has definite appeal, as you indulge your bad side against unwitting townsfolk.

Well... not quite unwitting. After getting over the shock of seeing zombies among them, the people start fighting back. A few at first, and then much more determined and strategic groups of the living start waging war against your zombie horde. You'll notice this while attempting to take out buildings, as people are throwing all kinds of stuff down on you. The points lost by your zombies will eventually "kill" them, at least until you regenerate them through a visit to one of the local clinics. Power-ups scattered around the level, or uncovered by killing people in the town, will help you regenerate some of the lost energy or grant you special powers for that level. Equipment is a critical factor in solving some of the games more involved puzzles, and you'll also need good timing to have each squad act at the right time in the right place, on the right enemy. After you play the first few challenges, you've seen all that Zombie Tycoon has to offer, and everything else is just a variation on the theme. For a bite-sized effort like this, there's nothing wrong with keeping it simple, but don't come expecting limitless customization and expansion such as we've seen in other tycoon games. The limitations of the portable systems are real, but they don't detract so much from the fun to be had with these zombies.

Nobody said that world domination would be easy. You'll find the difficulty scaling up quickly through the first few levels. It makes sense that smaller games like this need to ramp up the challenge earlier, since there aren't 100 levels to play through where you can spend the first 20 on training. Training happens in the first and second level, but you'll need to bring your game face to everything else or risk being sent home. Some of the challenge is intentional and good, such as the need to match your zombies' equipment to the obstacles they'll be facing. Collecting and using equipment in this format is a bit like managing resources in other tycoon games, and you can literally think of your zombies as resources that need managing. Zombie Tycoon breaks from formula with less success in some areas. An example is having to return to a clinic to recharge depleted squads, rather than just producing zombies at some point in the level that will join the fight. Other odd features are weak A.I. for the zombies that forces you to directly target each human you expect them to tackle. It seems strange that a group of zombies would just let a human walk by, but they will, so you have to worry about more than deployment for your squads. Keeping tabs on the humans in the level, who are almost always your target, is a bit clunky and can lead to some frustration. We loved the ideas in Zombie Tycoon, but the execution felt misdirected at times.

Strategy games almost always involve some form of cycling through various squads and resources, so no surprise that Zombie Tycoon involves similar mechanics. Viewing your squads and giving them commands individually is easy enough, or you can just send the entire group to attack a spot or person. Missions are increasingly designed to test how resourceful you can be in using your squads, and you'll find that you even get "Achievements" listed only in the game, recognizing special accomplishments, feats, or creativity. Using the face buttons to send a squad to a location or attack keeps things simple enough, and the Right Shoulder Button cycles through each of the squads as mentioned. You really can't do anything with zombies other than send them to a location, and this makes Zombie Tycoon a bit one dimensional at times. When your squads can't do much more than attack buildings and people, or stay away, you've got some potential boredom on your hands. Ratcheting up the difficulty is one way to keep players engaged, but it will also alienate those outside the core group that aren't willing to put in the sweat and tears to achieve that perfect mission.

More than anything else, we loved the humor in Zombie Tycoon. It is keenly aware of other zombie games and movies, which it pokes fun at occasionally in an oblique fashion. The execution and planning around controls and variety of gameplay didn't consistently thrill us, and held back Zombie Tycoon from being more than an interesting experiment. Considering the low barrier to entry you'll have in justifying this game's purchase price and storage requirements, we'd highly recommend taking a look if you have played other simulation, tycoon, or RTS games for PSP and loved them. There's good stuff aplenty in the strategy gameplay of Zombie Tycoon, making it more than a ploy to cash in on the world's fascination with macabre topics and the undead in general. Perhaps we'll now see mashups of Will Wright properties and Zombie Tycoon, something along the lines of "Undead Railroad Tycoon," or "Undead Sim Ant." With the recent success of literary mashups pairing Jane Austen and the undead, our vision may not be that far from the truth. Recommend highly as a rental, to determine if this brand of zombie strategy is your cup of blood and brains...