Zombo Buster Advance is a tower defence strategy game. You have 3 to 5 lanes to defend in 50 levels with over 10 different units. The enemies are mostly zombies. There are dozens of different enemies. You can upgrade abilities, gadgets and your units with different badges. There are badges to make your units stronger, shoot faster, make them cheaper, give a chance for a double shot and reduce the time to place them again. You can even upgrade these badges to make them have higher values.

What makes this tower defence game unique is how the lanes work. You can place units through spending energy, which will be produced automatically throughout the battle. Three different Units can be placed on one lane. These lanes work as elevator. You can swap them. So, if enemies attack in the first lane and your units are in the last one, you can swap all 3 units to the first lane. There is a timer so you can't swap every few seconds. The enemies also have different advantages. Sometimes there are stairs which they can go up or down, elevators, teleporters, healing stations and more.

As most of the enemies are zombies you will face dozens of different units with or without special abilities or armor. Some can make themselfes invinsible, some give other enemies armor, some can open a teleporter and call out for zombies.
Your Units are also pretty different and have unique abilties. The only thing i don't really like are the boss fights. They are pretty much the same every time. The boss even looks almost the same all the time, just with a different color and a different ability. But, it's mostly just a tank. Enemies attack you on all lanes, while you have to beat the boss. Thats it. I would have loved for the bosses to be different or introduce new mechanics / a special battle.

I almost beat the game. 2 bosses are left, which will take aprox. 1.5 hours i think. I did not encounter any bugs. The localiation (german) is very good and professional. Balance-wise its all pretty good except for armor. Armor will make you reliant on using ONE unit on every lane as a must have. This unit does not a lot of damage, but shoots pretty fast, which is the only thing that matters against armor. Since there are armored enemies on all lanes, you pretty much have to use him. Almost all other units can reduce armor, too. But one shot means reducing one armor, no matter how much damage they make. Since many units take 2-3-4 seconds to shoot and do a lot of damage, they are not as good as the ONE unit which shoots every 0.7 or 0.8 seconds.

All these things considered, battles can still be played in many different ways. I honestly did not expect this much from a 4€/USD game. I'm pretty much overwhelmed by content. There are some 10 or 20€ Games, which don't have that much content.
If you like tower defence games, you should give it a shot.

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Pros:
1) An original tower defense game where you have to elevate your units on different floors to deal with certain situations.
2) Collect up to 16 units as you progress 50 levels and 8 worlds or by earn achievements base on your performance in each level.
3) 45 Zombies with unique and troublesome abilities to bypass your defenses
4) 9 Gadgets you can use to support your units.
5) Upgrades and Badges that can empower your units (So far I have managed to beat the game with little grinding involved)
6) Environmental Hazards that can help zombies to gain advantage like Escalators to prevent repetitive gameplay
7) (Art) Colourful and detailed art designs that you can easily identify both the zombies and units

Cons: (Note the names of the characters were changed to prevent spoilers)
1) Some of the zombies uses cheap abilities to lose your life or mines for example Ghost's temporary invulnerability and Scientist's invisibility when they are close to the door can prevent the player for having a chance to kill them to either secure a General Rank or save the mine for later.
2) Low Replayability and Post-Game content such as Endless Mode after beating the story.
3) Achievements can be grindy and may depend on luck whether if the Units feels like using their ability.

Overview: I almost forgot about FireBeast until I browse through my steam recommendations and discover this last week. Gameplay wise, this game with worth the price as the game contains 20 units, 45 zombies, 9 gadgets, 50 levels and more. I had finished the whole game after 7 hours of playing with little grinding involved.

It is like plants vs zombies but more leveling up.

Is this an amazing game, no. Is it a great game, no. It is however a competent game and that's no bad thing.
It's essentially a variation on the plants v zombies gameplay style and it does it's job well enough.
I can't say i was enthralled all the time while playing this as it gets a bit grindy towards the end especially if chasing all the achievements but by and large it's fun and low cost fun at that.
6/10

Tower Defense with no speedup button. It's very slow, and not very deep. Plenty of better TD out there.

The first game was great. Its a classic tower defense and you can upgrade characters skills individually in spite of having to grind a little for gold. This game, is not that. You never have enough money or gold to upgrade troops, gadgets, or skills. The gameplay is too slow and you either have to grind a bunch to beat the boss levels or use the power ups

Wish I could give this a 'meh' instead of a Recommended.

Fun nostalgia to remind you of flash games of past, but not challenging in the slightest. Mediocre progression system for characters and skills with a tedious grind for runes.

*Achievement hunters: you will be forced to used terrible units over and over on earlier maps just to complete their challenges turning your brain into a zombo itself...

Well, this is a really nice Tower/lane defense game... It's well made, colorful, the elevator system adds a new layer of strategy and everytime I felt I hit a wall i was able to overcome it by messing with the "resources" tab which is fully resetable (you level up resources like unit power and the speed generator that let you add new units). The units are varied (some more useful than the others though) and the gadgets are fun. Really nice for the price.

My Experience

Zombo Buster Advance is very much a "what you see is what you get affair." There's very little I could tell you that isn't already covered sufficiently in the game's trailer. You're defending multiple floors simultaneously within a zombie-infested building. Using "energy" that is slowly accumulated over time, you deploy up to three troops per floor in an "elevator" on the left side, and you can swap one elevator with another to relocate your sets of three. Although there is a cooldown associated with the swap, you'll be able to switch and send your firepower where and when it is needed.

Each of the troops you can deploy can be upgraded through the application of five "badges," that improve things like damage, fire rate, deployment cost, etc. Three badges of the same type and level can be combined to create a badge of a higher level. I liked this system, although there were a few times when you'd merge badges and put yourself in a disadvantageous position - there were times when I merged three level eight badges to create a level nine, but then the next-highest badge I had would be a level two. You can spread the three level eight badges across three characters, whereas this isn't the case with the single level nine badge. One annoyance here is that you need to unequip badges to combine them between levels. I'd much rather the game just automatically unequip any badges that were used to fuse a higher level one. I spent a lot of time equipping and unequipping badges while playing.

The other gameplay aspects are the gadgets and items. You can equip up to three gadgets, and each recharges slowly after use. I stuck with the snap (kills a certain % of zombies on screen), the adrenaline shot (makes a set of three zombies shoot more quickly for a time), and a spike trap (that damages enemies that cross it). Outside of the spike trap, I mostly just used the gadgets during final waves or boss fights. Although you're given a few starter items (one-time-use consumables), items are so incredibly expensive that I wouldn't be surprised if you never bought any more. I don't even think I obtained the medal for using 10 items, and the game gives you 5 for free. The game also contains an upgrade system that you can use to increase your overall health, energy gain, gadget recharge, soldier damage, etc. This is well implemented and easy to use.

I enjoyed my time with the game - I'd often put on music and just watch my soldiers go to work. At the beginning of the game I mostly used the rocket launcher and SMG soldier, but by the end I was entirely reliant upon the sniper and a green, space marine-looking fellow who could remove all armor with a single shot. I also liked the creative enemy design, and the way that each set of levels introduces a new mechanic to shake things up (escalators, walkways, teleporters, healing modules, etc.).

If you are a person who loves Tower Defense Games, you will not regret this game.....Trust me on that...thanks me later :)