This Flash Game Is About Driving in the Zombie Apocalypse
"Road of the Dead" pairs a zombie apocalypse with the unstoppable force of a muscle car. But is this bloody Adobe Flash game fun to play?
A badass and his car: the image of a steely hero burning rubber in some kind of souped up supercar is a staple of the action genre. Call it a consequence of the car-centric infrastructure that surrounds the United States, or a byproduct of America’s expansive and varied territories. Either way, whenever there’s a hero afoot, chances are you’ll find them speeding along in some one-ton slab of metal and burning gasoline. What happens, then, when you combine this classic iconography with the wider spread of zombies in pop culture and the impressive technology powering Adobe Flash games? You end up with Road of the Dead, a game developed by Evil-Dog and published to Newgrounds in late 2010.
With art by SickDeathFiend and voice performances by Joshua Tomar among other prominent Newgrounds members, Road of the Dead is easily one of the most impressive Adobe Flash games in terms of what it’s trying to accomplish. But what is it about? How does it meld two distinct tropes that permeated the 2010s? And how did it gather so much acclaim from Newgrounds’ user base?
Road of the Dead (Literally)
Road of the Dead wastes no time in getting straight to the point. A lone, gruff man is seen working in his garage before he hears a startling report on the radio: the dead walk. With the surrounding city now under quarantine, you’ll have to mow down both malevolent soldiers and shambling corpses in order to escape. The game features a surprisingly-lengthy main mode that acts as its campaign, gradually ramping up the challenge while breaking itself into distinct levels. Additional modes offer a bit more variety, though they’ll all focus around the game’s central mechanic.
Driving is the name of the game — literally, in this instance — as Road of the Dead takes place from a first-person perspective. It’s already an impressive switch-up from what you’d typically find in similar games, placing you in the driver’s seat to navigate every twist and turn in the road. Abandoned cars, military checkpoints, panicking civilians, and, of course, zombies roam all three lines of a gargantuan freeway, forcing you to either swerve or strike through them at your own discretion. It’s up to you to balance your car’s durability with your bloodlust, as every little impact will gradually wear your car down into nothing.
Granted, while the actual driving itself is more like guiding your vehicle across a semi-dynamic set of railroad tracks, it works in the game’s favor. You’re continually fed a churning stream of obstacles, zombies, and soldiers unloading on your vehicle, with the game’s later challenges incorporating more complex obstacles throughout. Spike strips that can blow out your tires, for instance, make your journey a living hell, as you’ll be veering either left or right until you ultimately perish. Military helicopters force you to vacate specific lanes, potentially veering straight into danger or the ever-annoying spike stripes. It’s a fun roller coaster ride, one caked in viscera aplenty.
Speaking of which, the game is nothing short of a stunning sight to look at. It’s equal parts grimy and competent, with distinct threats in the distance bearing easily-identifiable silhouettes that you can appropriately plan to deal with. All the zombies either explode or fly away as you strike them with your car, caking the windshield in blood and cracks until it shatters outright. A few times, you’ll even be able to catch either a zombie or soldier on your hood, obscuring your view until you either shake them off or blow them away with one of your few pistol rounds. Distant buildings grow in size as you approach before they disappear behind you. Your car’s dashboard is updated in real-time with your current speed. Your vehicle can even catch on fire prior to its destruction, forcing you to seek an errant water barrel to extinguish yourself. The level of detail is nothing short of incredible. Even the voice acting is decent for the time.
Paved With Good Intentions
Of course, all these impressive effects come at a significant performance cost. While you could always lower the quality of the assets displayed on-screen (I certainly did when I originally played this more than a decade ago), the sheer amount of stuff going on does eventually become too much for the game to handle. The game’s speed is continually snagged with bouts of slowdown, and colliding with too many objects at once can become incredibly disorienting. Since you’re always moving forward, striking an obstacle flings you in either horizontal direction. As the road is full of obstacles, you could imagine how this could become an issue.
Still, despite these occasional hiccups, you’ll find that this first-person driving game not only nails its grotesque premise, but it does so in a way that really resonated with its intended audience. Reception on Newgrounds has been nothing but positive, amassing a nearly-perfect five-star rating across over 10,000 reviews. The game itself would be played over 5.5 million times, earning a place on the front page of Newgrounds as well as earning the Weekly Users’ Choice and Daily Feature awards.
SickDeathFiend, the game’s artist, would go on to create several other games in collaboration with Evil-Dog and voice actor Sapphire, publishing Lab of the Dead in 2011 and The Blind Swordsman in 2014. Evil-Dog, meanwhile, would be hard at work with the Punk-o-Matic series of interactive music composition games, which still maintain a small but devoted following to this day. Evil-Dog would then go on to create Evil Dog Games, a full game studio currently developing a turn-based fighting game called They Rule the Night.
Where Can I Play Road of the Dead?
Road of the Dead is currently available to play on Newgrounds. The same goes for the game’s sequel, Road of the Dead 2, which debuted in 2013.