If you think that this is just an Hotline Miami clone, you're wrong.
Garage Bad Trip does have its own identity, mainly thanks to the ambience, which is frightening but allows you to feel powerful as well.
The story is fine if you enjoy B-movies.
Soundtrack is good even tho not as present as I would've like.

And then, there's the gameplay...
Oh boy is it a love-hate relationship.

In most cases it's fine and the game is fun but when you have to make precise movements or when you collide with zombies it's horribly frustrating.
Also, what's up with the controls being different during the bike level ? I'm on an AZERTY layout but the game decided that QWERTY was the way to go during that part. Truly made me tilt.

But the reason for this review being positive instead of negative is that the good times were way more frequent that the bad ones. Plus the challenges that you unlock during story mode are a nice end game.

As closing words, just keep playing even when you just want to uninstall, the game is going to make it back to you.

(Also, please read the comments written by Sack Jack below, they give a nice opposite opinion on the game.)

An unexpected individual finds himself in an unexpected situation, awakening in the midst of a zombie apocalypse from the confines of an old broken down car's trunk. In a state of confusion you feel your way through the wreckage of modern civilization, through the abandoned and decaying parking garages and hallways of malls and other epicenters of human activity now infected and diseased.

In this hard new world the hallucinatory effect of various pills will be your only calming factor, and the one surreal beacon of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up light guiding you through this now twisted environment. A narrative of facing past demons, overcoming addictions, and crippling hallucinations guiding you deeper into hellish madness. Garage: Bad Trip is bloody. It's scary. It's trippy as hell.


Garage: Bad Trip may be a top-down romp filled with undead creatures and all sorts of grizzly weapons, but it takes a much more tension-building horror approach than its kind with its slower and more exploratory gameplay. Full of suspenseful discoveries of parts for important weapons and tools laid out progressively on a narrative journey of zombie-apocalypse, and plenty of jump-scares as grotesque creatures burst from behind the shadows of closed doors at you.

This isn't like most other top-down action games, where you go rushing in guns-blazing. Garage: Bad Trip feels much more like a top-down survival-horror where ammunition isn't infinitely expendable and your health is realistically and humanly fragile, to the point where even a diseased rat is enough to take you down without proper awareness.

That doesn't mean the game isn't an action-packed twin-stick powerhouse, it still is. It's just that Garage: Bad Trip has a much more rewarding trip to get there. It isn't too long into the 6-ish hour story that you've constructed and stockpiled and healthy selection of axes, guns, and all the ammo you need to go hog-wild on some rotting zombie carcasses, but you'll have to prove yourself first through sheer survival to reach that satisfying point.


Visually Garage starts out looking and feeling a bit like Hotline Miami with its gritty, crunchy lo-fi pixel-art and violent, bloody top-down perspective. This trip is a little different though, it's deliberately slower paced and much more calculated in its stone cold brutality. It draws you in with its chilling eeriness and building sense of terror.

It isn't long before pills and drugs are thrown into the mix, and this is where things get wonderfully weird. A bizarre, surreal and hallucinatory visual effect of neon colored vector lines overtakes your screen and is quite jarring and off-putting at first, while at the same time highlighting and guiding you to various hidden passageways deep into the walls of the compound you're exploring. It doesn't stop with the weirdness there, as you slowly descend into hallucinations of your deceased military father and visions of.. umm.. a race of rebelling and surviving mole people?

It's also all very much inspired by the grittiest of horror movies, by way of a 80's B-movie VHS filter, an off-the-wall story, and some awesomely gruesome creature designs. The 80's vibe really carries through the atmospherics of the game and the synth-y Carpenter-esque sound design, and the hilarious spoof Ad's and their ass-tastic EEL mascot were a surprisingly humorous treat in an otherwise brutal and grim game.


This is a very well composed and solid horror experience, it isn't going to be the straight-to-the-action Twin-stick fans of something like Hotline Miami or Nex Machina are going to be looking for but this is almost even more rewarding in the end due to the challenging sense of progress and the dire, suspenseful feeling of being under-armed and working against unfavorable odds.

Garage: Bad Trip shines it's brightest when it comes to its aesthetic, its gritty 80's video-rental store nostalgia and Splatterpunk style. We see the style attempted often but rarely done right and I'm happy to say this is a definite case of retro sensibilities done competently.

This review made possible through the generosity, consideration and contribution of Review Experts(REXnetwork) and the developer/publisher.

Email contact@dnbmedia.co for requests & game promotions

So, one way you can tell a game is good, is when you buy it, on a whim, at the same time as another game that you were actually anticipating, and you end up playing that impulse-purchase game more. And enjoying it.

I bought this at the same time as Cross Code, which I'd been keeping an eye on for a while. I've only put an hour into Cross Code at time of writing, but I've finished Garage and had a (mostly) great time.

Garage is a top-down shooter with a 'cone of vision' mechanic. It feels like a cross between Hotline Miami and Teleglitch. You cant take much damage, you'll die and retry a lot, and it's full of low-fi violence. It also has moments of humor, moments of weirdness, puzzles, and a decent mix-up of combat encounters.

I really only have 2 complaints.
1. There is one single section where the save-points are spaced a bit too far apart. That was annoying.
2. Sometimes the game will spawn enemies behind you, which given the 'cone of vision' you have, can feel cheaper than usual. The section I mentioned in point 1 does this, which makes it doubly annoying.
Still, other than that one section, Garage was a lot of fun, and I'd happily buy a sequel.

Please do everything you can to get past the horrible beginning rat boss. It gets so much better after that, I promise.

It's adecent game, although the environment get repetitive after a bit and the action is frenetic in a BAD way. I would have preferred more monstrous enemies but in reality you spend the majority of time shooting soldiers with split second reaction and great accuracy, forcing you to restart from the last checkpoint having memorized their position in order to preemptively shoot before they appear on screen. Later levels are a PITA made of constant trial and error.

I wish there was a meh rating...

Garage Bad Trip Review

Garage Bad Trip is one of those discounted games that I bought with low expectations and it turn out to be pretty great. I was expecting a hotline Miami meets zombie game mash up and to some extent it is just that. However it blew me away with its unique visuals, sound design and quirky cheesy Evil Dead inspire storyline. In some ways it has all the greatness of B grade horror movie with a lot of gore, blood, freaky monster and nonsensical villains. Garage Bad Trip by Zombie dynamics is a twin stick shooter game that is oozing with some scary sound design and great looking pixelated visuals styles.

The game starts as you play as Butch, a down on your luck drug- dealer working for what I assume is a pharmaceutical company that owns a mall. Some catastrophe has happen thus forcing him to try to escape his current predicament. Most of the dialog in the game is pretty mysterious and unusual evoking that surreal feel when you have a bad hang over while you are figuring out what when wrong the previous day. Hence the title I guess with small scenes of some trippy drug induced neon light moments. It plays simple enough, with the WASD keys as movement. The mouse is used to aim and fire with the left click while the right click to kick enemies away. If I am not mistaken shift is used to dodge enemies and that is about it. From the get go, there is very little hand holding with small tutorial bits. Most of the time you are left to your own devices to figure out the puzzle and how the various weapons work. Most of the weapons play like they should and feel impactful. The shotgun is often use for crowd control and the pistol well you know what that is for and etc. Controls for the most part is rather smooth.

There is a weird sense of Resident Evil meets Evil Dead playing Garage Bad Trip. The starting especially reminds me of RE as Butch meets his first zombie and has to kill it to get the key. Despite the top down perspective and pixelated graphics, I somehow experience that small dread which I remember from RE which is bolstered by great sound design and VHS like grain filter enhancing the creepy lightly lit area. The rest of the games plays like your typical B grade horror story with unusual characters, villains, the undead and quirky one liners occasionally being mention during dialog. The quirky and mysterious dialog helps adds atmosphere to it despite a few grammatical errors. With that being said, the journey and action was a lot of fun but boy is this game hard. Is not as merciless as Hotline Miami but the enemies will still tear you a new one if you do not keep your distance or do not plan properly before you enter an area. And not understanding the recoil impact of some weapons can spark your doom. In some ways, there is a dark souls vibe as you die and repeat.

It definitely has its own thing going despite the similarity with hotline Miami and the trippy moments. I guess the only downside is that is not really long game with it being roughly 5 to 6 hours long, and the puzzles are a bit obtuse but there is some replay value if you want to beat the challenges stages. If you are in need for some top down shooter with a good sound design, very cool VHS pixelated aesthetic graphics with zombie and a some B grade horror, Garage Bad Trip would be a good trip to take.

Graphics 8 – Pixelated VHS done to perfection elevate what could just be another pixelated good looking game to something quite unique

Gameplay 7 – The smooth gun play shooting and satisfaction as zombies explode in satisfying pixelated goo

Sound 8 – Great sound design, with creatures screeching and gun sounds impactful

Story 6 – Your typical B grade horror movie with a unique way to tell a familiar twist

often challenging, rarely fun.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. It's got some cool ideas here and there, the presentation is good, it manages to be decently creepy despite its retro, overhead presentation. The music is solid and atmospheric. And the narrative is interesting.

But the game is just downright unfair a lot of the time. I almost quit partway through the fourth level, right before you get your first gun, because of the rats. Rats can only be killed by kicking them, which is slow, has a narrow area of effect, and leaves you wide open if you miss. I got stuck on a swarm of them and almost gave up right then and there, but managed to power through. Once I got a gun the game's combat opened up and the challenge actually felt fair...until the underground prison.

There you're fighting dozens of soldiers with guns of their own, and the game's unbalanced nature becomes painfully clear. Your guns suffer from a degree of spread that makes accuracy over distances troublesome, while the enemy's are so accurate I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually using hitscan. Enemy grenades are akin to homing missiles that zoom right at you and blow up on contact, and drop your life down to almost nothing if you're within half a screen of them, while yours are more like polite suggestions for the enemy to "please, for the love of God, die already." It's a suggestion they don't often take; several times I threw a grenade into a small room right next to enemies, only to go in for mop-up and find out they didn't even take a scratch, shortly before being gunned down.

If you have the patience for a janky, frustrating game with some interesting ideas, maybe give it a try on sale. As for me, I'm uninstalling and finding something more entertaining to do with my time.

This game was kinda cool. The action was satisfying, at least for most of the game. There were a couple of rage inducing levels later in the game. This was mostly due to the poor controller optimization, particularly aiming with the right analog stick. It’s awkward and caused much undue frustration; the crosshairs always seems to float slightly to your left or right and never seems to stay centered.

Story was trite and needed some fleshing out. There were some attempt at humor but they mostly fall flat, save for one instance where your character stumbles across a joint of some wacky tobacco in one of the later levels.

Presentation was pretty good overall. Didn’t care for the whole enemies popping out of darkness technique- felt awkward and just plain lazy. That being said, the sense of atmosphere is there, and the sound design and music are solid and contribute to the horror vibe nicely. The CRTV cutscenes were neat - wished there were more of them. It also would have been nice to have a look ahead feature similar to Hotline Miami’s but it really didn’t hurt the gameplay overall.

Despite some gameplay balancing issues, I found Garage: Bad Trip to be a pretty enjoyable experience. I recommend, but only if you can grab it on sale or in a cheap bundle (I got it in the latter). Hopefully if there’s a sequel as indicated, the devs get the controls a little tighter and polish up the gameplay in general. There’s definitely potential for greatness here...

Summary: Not Recommended. For the most part, GARAGE really nails it on the presentation (I mean the trailer certainly sold me on it), but it completely ♥♥♥♥♥ the bed mechanically. While playable, a litany of ill-thought out mechanical design choices make the game a challenge that is consistently more frustrating than genuinely enjoyable or fun. Despite getting more fun when you start getting to less crazy-tight corridors (with less, but not absent, rats) in the last 3 or so chapters, it really wears out its welcome at 6 hours, and for a $15 asking price you can do a lot better.

Full Review:
In GARAGE, you play as guy with amnesia working his way through a parking garage as some kind of zombie apocalypse occurs. You have melee punches and kicks to start, and then you find stuff like an ax, a shotgun, a pistol, etc. to kill baddies with. The narrative gets pretty wild from there at its own weird pace, but at the end I was surprised at just how very grounded and thoroughly explained it all was. The game really doesn't sell itself on its narrative, and I didn't really care about it too much because the rest of the game was so frustrating mechanically, but it's actually a pretty good story that I could really never guess the next turn in.

The game sells itself a lot on its presentation and style, and not undeservedly so. The visuals are technically 3D, but it doesn't seem like that most of the time because of a scan-line set that are ever-present on the screen, as the game is going for a kind of VHS B-Movie Horror aesthetic in all kinds of ways. The colors will spasm, the screen telescopes (kinda like Hotline Miami but you don't really have control over it), and the blood and gore are EVERYWHERE as you fight increasingly crazy monsters. The only real complaint I have with the visuals is that they're sometimes a bit TOO crazy, and they can make what you can and can't walk on confusing as well as make hitboxes unclear.

Interesting presentation and premise aside, the game really starts to tank in the mechanics department, as the game's largest problems come from its survival horror meets twin-stick shooter design. Functionally it's adequate enough to complete the game, but I'd be skeptical on how long you could keep your sanity if you played through with a gamepad the whole way through. The only reason I was able to stick with it is because I switched to mouse & keyboard a couple hours in. And before I continue on, I will mention that the controls are bugged for gamepad for the Steam version of this (I believe it's also at least available on Xbox One), as you can't actually steer vehicles with the gamepad. The animation for turning happens, but you don't turn. You need to use WASD to turn the motorcycle in the earlier chapters and it's crazy awkward (but at least it's a short section).

When I think "twin-stick shooter," I think crazy arcadey action like Smash TV or Forgotten Worlds. Using one stick to keep yourself alive and the other to fire wildly at the oncoming onslaught. When I think "survival horror," I think careful, methodical playing to conserve the limited rations you have, because every enemy is dangerous and your resources for dealing with them are very limited. Why anyone though mixing these two genres would be a great idea, I have no clue, but GARAGE fails to execute this fusion well.

The simple fact is that this game plays like garbage on a gamepad (with twin-sticks) because it is unreasonably difficult to aim accurately with the right joystick compared to aiming with your mouse. Conserving ammo is basically impossible because stuff is so hard to hit in the first place, and the game is hard enough and your ammo caps are low enough that you really can't afford to mess up too many shots. You melee attacks are absolutely garbage, and this also brings me onto another important point that exemplifies all of the trouble with the lack of thought that went into crafting the mechanics of this "twin-stick shooter": Rats.

Rats are the very first enemy you meet in the game, and they'll be jumping you to try and attack you the whole way through it up to the very final boss fight. They go towards you slowly, then CHARGE at you, almost faster than you can move, and they also do tons of damage, so they can't just be ignored or gone past. Your choices to deal with rats are two: You can either use a precious bullet of the few you have to shoot the rat and hope you hit that tiny target, or you can kick it. Kicking is a special melee attack that you can do no matter what weapon you're holding. You can't kick while moving, it has a very short range, and the range isn't even the width of your already thin character. If the enemy isn't within about the middle third of the front of you (and nearly on top of you already), you aren't gonna land that kick. Add on top of that that rats take not one but TWO kick to kill, and you have an insanely infuriating enemy that is present throughout the whole game, whose main design flaw would've been dealt with had rats been melee-able just like any other enemy in the game.

And the list of problems with the genre mash-up absolutely doesn't stop there.
- You have a dodge roll, but you already normal-walk faster than most any can run and the walls are lined with deadly fire and pits that can kill you so it's totally useless or worse almost the entire game.
- The telescoping screen and crazy lights don't just make you sick, they can also hide enemies with guns off-screen who can see you but you can't see them, and they deal SO much damage that you may as well trial-and-error your way through a section to see where all the hidden gun-guys are so you don't just die a bunch just from not being psychic.
- To add icing on the cake of cheap enemies with guns, they also have guns with much higher accuracy then you, so they'll routinely empty an entire clip into you while you literally can't hit them that many times from the same distance away with (supposedly) the exact same weapon.
That's about everything, but I'm sure I've forgotten something. Regardless, I hope I've made it evident that the mechanics in this game REALLY needed some rebalancing and re-thinking before launch, because they make an already annoying genre mash-up even less bearable.