Zombie Nation (NES Review)
May 16, 2026 1 Comment
Zombie Nation
aka Abarenbou Tengu
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released December 14, 1990
Designed by Takane Ohkubo
Directed by Norio Nakagata
Developed by KAZe
Published by Meldac
Sold Separately for Nintendo Switch (w/ Japanese ROM) for $11.99
This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a giant ugly head wrecking sh*t.
The only reason I fired-up Zombie Nation wasn’t for this review. It’s because I had started playing Super Pinball: Behind the Mask for the SNES and, while looking at the credits for that game’s director, Norio Nakagata, I saw that this was his first game directed. “Zombie Nation? Isn’t that the weird shmup with the head?” Yep, so I fired it up with the intent to crack wise on it in my giant-sized Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review (coming July 1, celebrating 15 years of IGC!). Guess what? I can’t crack wise on it! The f*cking asshole had the nerve to make a pretty damn good shmup! What a jerk, right? I guess I mistook Zombie Nation for being one of those games that shows up on “worst NES games” lists. It seems that the lists it usually shows up on are “weirdest video games” lists. Oh yes, because it’s totally normal to have a plumber double in size when he eats mushrooms as he goes on an adventure to rescue a princess from an evil half dragon, half-turtle. But a disembodied head trashing a city and fighting a living Statue of Liberty? THAT’S WEIRD! Isn’t that weird, Lokar, the disembodied head that attacks Angel Grove in the first season of the unprecedented pop cultural phenom Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?
“Bitch, who are you calling weird?”
Beg your pardon. I, uh…… Carry on! What I meant is…………..
Isn’t that weird, free-moving Statue of Liberty featured in the major motion picture Ghostbusters II, a hugely successful and famous smash hit (even if it sucks) that debuted #1 in the US box office THE YEAR BEFORE ZOMBIE NATION EVEN RELEASED?!
“Somehow not as weird as New York being attacked by a giant monster made of marshmallow in a movie that’s about ghosts but everyone just acts like it makes sense!”
Seriously, how the hell did this make a weird game list? Wouldn’t the shorter list be “NES action games that aren’t weird”? By the way, I spent the entire game waiting for the fight against the Statue of Liberty and it turns out the gigantic Medusa head at the start of the game was the Statue of Liberty fight. Now granted, I’ve never actually been to New York City but I’m pretty sure it’s not a statue of f*cking Medusa.
I’m now looking at the screenshot and feeling like a complete idiot. How didn’t I realize it was the Statue of Liberty wearing an oversized novelty Medusa headdress? I think you can buy one at Spirit Halloween, though if your head is THAT big you might need to special order it.
Honestly, Zombie Nation ain’t a bad little game at all. Certainly not $11.99 good. City Connection, I seriously advise you to drop the price to $4.99. For a thirty-six year old single game on any platform (and packing the Japanese ROM doesn’t make it a two-pack even if the sprites are different) $11.99 is a LOT of money. A person can buy Atari 50‘s base set that includes 115 classic games and literally hours worth of extra features for $39.99 and you’re charging over 25% of that set’s price for one obscure NES game and its nearly identical Famicom counterpart which can be beaten in under an hour in a package that only includes a handful of normal emulator features as “extras.” You’re pricing yourself out of the market and that really pains me in the case of Zombie Nation. I think the average gamer would absolutely shell out for $5 or less for a game like it. $11.99 is one of those “we have to think about it” things, something usually reserved for collections of mostly obscure games like Taito Milestones 2. But $4.99? That’s the impulse buy sweet spot. You’re doing more than double that price, and you ought not to.
Oh it’s total chaos, but trust me, it’s charming as f*ck.
Pricing aside, Zombie Nation is a fun little game. Using this disembodied head, you travel through what the game says is four levels, but levels 1, 2, and 3 are actually divided into two parts so functionally it’s seven levels and five bosses. You have a pretty fun to use basic gun that can be upgraded by catching falling humans. Wait, are you eating them? Why is this called Zombie Nation? Why does the cover suggest a Zombies Ate My Neighbors-like zombie apocalypse?
There’s more. So much more. It’s bananas and glorious.
And the whole disembodied head isn’t some weird “lost in translation” thing because the Japanese game does the same thing, only with a different head. The Japanese version is based on the concept of a spirit of vengeance taking the form of a Namakubi, which is literally a freshly severed head (it’s one of Japan’s most popular themes for tattoos).
Otherwise, it’s the same game. Instead of changing the theme for the US release, they just changed the hero sprite and turned the Statue of Liberty into a giant Medusa. Wait, they did what? Oh…….. OH!Â
I guess they don’t have Spirit Halloweens in Japan.
Okay, well, either way Zombie Nation is a fairly basic SHMUP with the biggest twist being you don’t really have lives. You essentially have a life bar with eight segments. That doesn’t necessarily mean you get eight hit points. Even with a wide variety of enemies, the main antagonistic element of Zombie Nation is often pinning players into a smaller section of the playfield using lasers, lightning, smoke stacks, etc. The game leans into this in nearly every level. Even boss fights do it sometimes, and crossing the path of one seems to take your hit points all the way down to the last segment. But it actually works really well at keeping the action tense.
You really don’t want to get caught behind them, though most of the time you do get a chance to make a move before you’re forced in. I got a feel for the timing pretty quickly.
On the other hand, some enemies and bullets don’t stand out as much as you’d hope. When I died, it usually wasn’t because I ran out of options but instead was caught off guard by a random bullet or enemy that I lost in the fog of war. Thankfully, you also get a handful of continues (and get an additional continue after each of the first three bosses). Some people say Zombie Nation is hard. I used autofire and didn’t think it was more or less difficult than your average generic NES shooter. Something like, say, Abadox. In terms of difficulty, the controls aren’t quite as accurate as a game based around precision movement probably should be, but Zombie Nation shouldn’t be impossibly hard for even average shmup players who don’t feel up to mashing buttons and go with autofire.
You can also die from being crushed by the auto scrolling. Even this is worked into the level design, as there’s a pipe maze in the third stage that, at one point, splits into a five-way pick-a-path. Thankfully the game does give you enough time to know which is the correct one before the squishing happens.
What makes Zombie Nation work is there’s almost always stuff to blow up. Not just enemies but buildings and caves and rock walls. The opening level set in the city feels especially cathartic and destructive, like if the game Rampage was turned into a shmup. I’m not sure exactly how blowing up a city that’s clearly populated with citizens is saving the world, but I’m not going to argue with a game where this is the second boss:
What the actual f*ck is that?! Has Santa been training for a body building contest?
I also wish the game had a more Konami-like inventory system. While the basic gun can be upgraded by rescuing falling citizens (you can tell them apart from human enemies by the “HELP” word balloons as they fall to their deaths), all it does is add extra bullets and, once it’s maxed out, a screen-clearing bomb. A bigger variety of guns that have different bullet sprites would have helped to keep the game even more fresh. By the end, I admit I was happy the game only had the four (seven) levels because it was starting to get exhausting. It doesn’t help that the third boss is one of those scrolling large vehicle boss stereotypes that has the lamest primary target I’ve ever seen from the trope, and then the boss before the final boss is just what seems to be tiny little fish skulls leaving trails behind them. Seriously, the last two level bosses were so disappointing given the wackiness that had already happened. Did they run out of drugs or something?
Thankfully Zombie Nation, a game about ZOMBIES with ZOMBIE right in the title that doesn’t seem to have a single enemy zombie, ends with a boss fight against a humongous green alien that appears to be sleeping in a room covered in bubble wrap. Ahhh, that’s the good stuff. So I’m happy I threw on Zombie Nation for the purpose of making a joke in an almost completely unrelated review that won’t even be posted for a month-and-a-half. It’s certainly not perfect, but I really like old school shmups and this is one that goes for absurdity and mostly succeeds. I think it’s a safe bet that the developers had this hilarious idea for a parody of the shoot ’em up genre but ran out of gags with BARELY half a game. The last level is a stereotypical cave or volcano and it’s just not at all what I signed up for after the first level. It still has some good visuals, but the personality is gone. I guess these lava or rock monsters could be sh*t monsters:
Give these things opera singing lessons and they could have become gaming icons.
So while the combat is fun and cathartic, Zombie Nation doesn’t completely escape being generic. The same concept would have probably worked out so much better in 16 bits, where the absurdity could have been cranked-up and there could have been more visual gags. But, let it be said that Zombie Nation might be a joke game, but the action is no joke. It’s a lot of fun and, frankly, it doesn’t last long enough to get boring. Oh, it does come dangerously close, but even when enemy and level themes are phoned-in, there’s almost always some genuinely exciting level design based around close calls and non-stop shooting action. There’s even two difficulty levels. So yeah, I really liked this a lot. Zombie Nation does NOT belong on “weirdest game” lists. But you know what list it does belong on? “Most underrated NES games.” Zombie Nation is one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had in 2026, and I was even happier when I saw it was being sold on the eShop. Priced too high? Sure, but nothing worth losing your head over. Yeah, I deserve boos for that one.
Verdict: YES!
Hold on……. Is it called Zombie Nation or Samurai Zombie Nation?
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