I'm the world's worst tower defense player.  Personally, I hate those types of games: controlling inventory and blocking exits, setting up defensive weapons, dropping them off in specific spots to prevent being overrun by the enemy.  Give me a gun, tell me to run my character into a room of the undead and blow them all away and I'm a happy person!

I love zombie games, spraying blood and guts all over the place to the people who, just the day before, may have delivered my newspaper, dropped off the mail, or taken my toll at the bridge.  Zombies are on the gaming food chain next to the Nazi.  I feel no guilt killing them, I don't mind doing it, and if you make the game right, well, it just ups the fun of killing them.

Then Digital Reality comes and offers them both in one title, Dead Block, which was released on July 6 for the XBLA, and July 21 for the PSN.

The official word:

Set in the U.S. during the idyllic 1950s, Dead Block takes players to a simpler
time when a gallon of gas cost a few pennies, the golden age of cinema was in
full swing, and that new (and apparently insanely evil) craze called rock 'n
roll swept the nation and caused an apocalyptic musical plague to turn the
deceased into the walking dead!

The three survivors of the shuffling zombie onslaught  Mike, Jack and Foxy
hide in shelters around town and fortify their area by boarding up windows and
setting a variety of unique, entertaining traps like the Cardboard Trap that
makes zombies attack each other or the Freeze Trap that causes them to break into pieces.

The characters of the game are a true Odd Squad, with the strong guy, the skilled woman, and the intelligent if not creative boy scout (definitely a 50s vibe going on).

The game's graphic style is kid-freindly comic book, but the game play is definitely not kid-friendly, with weapons like frying pans, a freeze weapon, cooking meat, and swarms of bees to kill of zombies who squirt blood and fall apart into a pile of body-part mess and guts (and brains).

Your task is to defend yourself against the zombie hoard with your collection of weapons, while looking for guitar parts that will allow you to finish each level.  When you get the 3 pieces for the guitar, you play a simple Guitar Hero-ish game to follow the button presses that scroll on the top of the screen, which triggers The End of the level.

Music is also a smart weapon of sorts in levels, inserting coins in the JukeBox plays music which makes the zombies dance themselves to death.  Hmm.  Interesting.  For defense, smashing apart tables will  often produce a 2x4, which you can use to block doors and windows.  But if you smash apart a fridge, or a chair, or a toilet, a 2x4 will fall out.  Sometimes you will find items that need to be uncovered from debris to allow you to level some items up.

One level introduces a cool new zombie killing mechanic: the electric heater.  You can collect steaks in the level, and plop the steak on the heater which starts to cook.  Zombies want meat, so they head over to the heater and end up electrocuting themselves.

There are simple puzzle mechanics for unlocking certain areas.  The puzzles are a simple "line up the pieces to unlock".  You'd think this type of puzzle would be in a kid's game, but when you're trying to solve a puzzle while surrounded by a dozen or so plodding zombies, a complicated puzzle is the last thing you want to deal with.

Dead Block isn't perfect, and the one stand-out problem with the game is the lack of speed.  Your characters and their mechanics are slow, the zombies are slow, the movements are slow, smashing a zombie across the face with a pan is slow.  The other is in-level saving, which doesn't exist.  After I wander through a level for awhile and die, I have to go back to the beginning and start the level over.  I don't want to do that all the time!

We can't really recommend Dead Block as a "must-buy", but the guys and their eclectic taste in games does recommend it as a "why not try".  They gave it the old college try, and came up a little short.