“Zombies have eaten my neighbors,” exclaims Zack, Monster Madness’ nerdy high school protagonist. In this one line of dialogue, spoken with puberty-piercing teenage angst, this game is perfectly encapsulated. It’s a spirited throwback to the 16-bit heyday, and an outlandish adventure that oozes camp.

Fans of Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Ghoul Patrol will certainly feel at home with Monster Madness’ mindless button mashing, zany storytelling, and uncanny ability to turn your world upside down in the most unexpected of ways. The scope of the game is as basic as can be: use excessive force to annihilate everything that moves – even the cat-loving granny that only wants to smother you in kisses.

Since this is a tale of suburbia overrun by an unexpected zombie attack, weapons are not easy to come by. As you jam on buttons to keep the brain-eating horde at bay, you’ll also be tasked with scouring the environments to find parts – such as metal shafts and screws – that can be used to manufacture makeshift weapons. Leaping to hard-to-reach rooftops, knocking over garbage cans, and veering off the beaten path to find these parts gives this simplistic hack n’ slash game an engaging RPG-like quality.

Whether you are brandishing a razor-sharp axe or a high-powered shotgun, Monster Madness’ combat functionality is handled quite well. The character movements are swift, the weapons have a nice bite to them, and you can even change to an over-the-shoulder view for long-range assaults. Thanks to these fluid controls, you can really get into a zombie-killing groove.

Even if you have the most powerful of weapons in your arsenal, however, Monster Madness’ simplistic gameplay can be incredibly frustrating. It would appear that, in drawing inspiration from the games of old, developer Artificial Studios picked up some bad habits along the way. One-hit deathtraps and a low number of checkpoints are a bad combo – especially when all of the time you spent exploring levels to collect parts is lost. Poorly executed vehicular segments further complicate matters. The game also struggles with its multiplayer support. Shoddy camera tracking makes the four-player offline co-op (not supported through Xbox Live) more of a mess than anything. The array of Xbox Live versus modes don’t do much to bring out your competitive spirit, either.

In putting a smile on the faces of nostalgic gamers, Monster Madness also gives them a black eye with its maddening stretches of gameplay. Games like this are definitely needed, but the quality really has to be there to match the historic theme. It’s well worth a look, but go into it knowing that it offers some problems that you thought that developers destroyed years ago.