Drunken Fist 2: Zombie Hangover

I went in with the lowest of expectations and still managed to find myself grinning for the first twenty minutes, which is either a compliment to Deklazon or a comment on my own susceptibility to ragdoll physics. Drunken Fist 2: Zombie Hangover is a third-person beat-em-up where you play a leather-jacketed rocker who wakes up mid-zombie-apocalypse and responds to this information by immediately looking for more beer. The premise is exactly that dumb, and for a while, it commits to the bit with enough energy to be genuinely charming. The mechanical loop is narrow but legible: punch, kick, roundhouse sweep, and - the game's genuine standout trick - urinate on the pavement to create a slip hazard that sends zombies cartwheeling into each other. Beer bottles scattered around each area refill health and keep the bladder meter ticking, so there is this weird, circular rhythm of drink, fight, relieve yourself, repeat that somehow never stopped being a little funny. Weapons glow purple when discoverable, and clubs or hammers feel satisfyingly chunky for the few uses they survive before breaking. The connected level structure, where areas flow into each other rather than hard-cutting between loading screens, gives the run a loose sense of momentum, almost like a very short, very stupid road movie. The problems are real and consistent across every review I cross-referenced. Combat accuracy is the core offender: your punches and kicks arc unreliably, meaning you will miss visibly slow-moving zombies at point-blank range more often than feels intentional. The kick is the dominant move because it has the most reliable reach, so most encounters devolve into mashing the same button while hoping the hitbox cooperates. Later areas introduce armoured zombies and gun-wielding undead that punish this approach hard, but the game never hands you better tools to adapt - you cannot pick up enemy weapons, and most of the environmental props are decorative. Bugs add their own texture: floating corpses, a bladder mechanic that occasionally stops registering inputs entirely, and the odd body pinging across the geometry like a pinball. The looping thrash-metal soundtrack and a booming announcer voice that shouts a descriptor every time you land a kill are either endearing or deeply irritating depending on your tolerance for exactly that kind of low-budget bravado. Replay value is close to zero. The run clocks in around an hour or two, there are no collectibles beyond achievements and trophies, no branching paths, no difficulty options worth noting, and no reason the game gives you to return once the credits roll. For a certain kind of player - streamers, achievement hunters, people who want something absurd to share with friends for exactly one session - this hits that niche cleanly. For anyone hoping a zombie skin over the first game's framework would produce something with more depth or longevity, the honest answer is that it does not. Deklazon made incremental improvements: the levels have actual backgrounds now instead of a black void, movement is a fraction more responsive, and the gore effects have a bit more weight to them. But the structural thinness that made the original divisive is fully intact here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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