Zombie Café puts an undead twist on the Cafe World formula

If Zynga’s Cafe World had a zombie outbreak, it would look a lot like Zombie Café. The two games are similar in a lot of ways, but only one has zombies serving handburgers to unsuspecting customers. We’ll let you guess which one.

In the world of Zombie Café the undead can be docile, which makes them perfect for the service industry. You’ll be running a dingy restaurant and your only employees would probably rather be eating the customers. But instead, they work tirelessly for you. The set-up is simple: you have a menu from which you can cook meals, each of which takes a certain amount of time to cook and provides a certain number of servings. If you run out of food, you'll have nothing to sell. While a meal is cooking, someone (either you or a zombie employee) needs to be watching over it, while everyone else handles serving the customers. Keeping them happy will earn you cash and experience that can be used to upgrade your restaurant and unlock new content.

But it wouldn’t be much of a zombie game if that was all there was to it. Your zombie helpers all have energy meters, and if you have them working while they’re too tired they’ll begin attacking customers, chasing away any potential sales. So you’ll need to rest them regularly. As you gain levels you’ll be able to add more employees, which you can do by infecting poor helpless customers.

Your restaurant isn’t the only one on the block, however. There’s competition everywhere. To tilt the odds toward yourself, you can send your zombies out to attack nearby restaurants. Depending on their level of fatigue and how your experience stacks up against your competition, a winner will be declared. If you win there’ll be some bonuses in it for you, but if you lose you’ll need to reanimate your zombie workforce, which takes time.

The gameplay is fun, if not particularly original, but what makes Zombie Café so enjoyable is its disturbing sense of humor. You’ll be serving meals that consist of everything from bowls of dishwater soup to gelatin molds filled with eyeballs. Why anyone would ever eat at your restaurant remains a mystery. Maybe it’s the service. The visuals contribute quite a bit to the humor of the game, with cartoon zombies shambling around and terrified customers waving their arms in the air. And when a human dies, a black “censored” bar covers up all the gory bits.

Zombie Café isn't all that different from Cafe World, but its undead theme, and all of the gameplay twists that go along with it, make it a much better experience. It’s pretty simple, and there will be times when you have nothing to do besides sitting and waiting for a meal to finish cooking or for a zombie to resurrect. But it’s all worth it when you get to serve people Hobo Delight. Whatever that might be.