App Review: Zombies, Run!

App Review: Zombies, Run!

My wife and I are certainly no health buffs. Still, we try to take care of our bodies and sometimes do a little extra to live a little healthier or shed some pounds. For almost a year now we have sorta been doing the South Beach diet. “Sorta” means we started out strong, nearly completing Phase 1 without a hitch, moved on to Phase 2 and remained consistent for several weeks. Needless to say, as the months went by our meal plans moved further and further away from a strict South Beach menu. That doesn’t mean we’ve totally fallen off the wagon. There are still several good habits we have maintained and we are still dropping weight, or at least maintaining and not gaining it back. We’re just progressing much, much slower than if we followed the diet more consistently. Anyone who is trying to lose weight knows (or should know) that good eating alone isn’t enough. Sure, it’s beneficial and you might even ultimately reach your goal. However, if you can include some type of exercise your progress will be much improved. At best, when combined with a good diet, you lose weight faster. At worst, it can help offset those days when you eat more than you should and keep you from gaining. Although it’s difficult for me to find the time, I do try to exercise when I can. My main form of exercise is walking and jogging. Some people walk or jog with no assistance. Other listen to music. Still, other use apps on their phone to help motivate them. The app that I like to use is Zombies, Run! from Six to Start. Zombies, Run! motivates through the use of storytelling. The app pairs with your favorite music player and every so often interrupts the music with a segment of the story that is fully dramatized with voice actors and sound effects. You play the role of Runner 5, a member of Abel Township, an outpost in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Your job is to go on missions to find supplies, scout out the area or perform other tasks while avoiding the living dead. As the story unfolds you meet different residents of Abel Township, learn their stories, encounter enemies, find out facts about why people are turning into zombies and try to find a way to stop the apocalypse. Typically, each mission is an exercise session, or you can play multiple sessions if you tend to take longer walks/runs. The length of each mission can be customized and you can use the story cues, like I do, to dictate your pacing. When the action is low you walk or jog and when the action picks up (i.e. zombies are closing in) you speed up your pace. If you want additional motivation you can turn on chase mode. In chase mode, there will be several times during your session where you will be chased by a horde of undead creatures. During these chases, you must pick up your pace by a percentage that you program. If you drop below that pace before time is up you are caught and lose some of the supplies you have gathered. Currently, Zombies, Run! includes six seasons that contain over 250 missions total. While the story mode is great, there are other ways you can exercise using Zombies, Run!. Some other options include Airdrop, where you pick a point in the real world to run to and the program creates a story to accompany you; Supply runs that allow you to run for an unlimited amount of time and gather supplies; Interval Training that changes the pace up during your session; race training from 5K up to full marathon; and Radio Abel which lets you listen to the Abel Township radio station as you work out. The app even includes a town building game that lets you expand Abel Township using all the supplies you collected during your real world runs. Zombies, Run! runs on both IOS and Android mobile devices and you can install and run the first five missions for free. After that, you unlock one new mission every 5 days. If you outpace that or wish to have access to the additional exercise options I mentioned above, you can subscribe monthly or yearly (yearly is the better value after six months). I really enjoy the story and the acting is very well done. It’s like listening to a radio play while you exercise. One of my favorite missions involved me running to several toy and bookstores in town while avoiding zombies, all for the purpose of collecting rulebooks, dice, miniatures, and paints for a D&D style role-playing game that my fellow townsfolk were interested in playing. Like the diet, I’ve slacked a bit the past several months with my exercise. However, with October here, it’s probably a good time to jump back into Zombie’s, Run! and try to get fit again. We’ll see how that goes.
(Note: Neither I nor Half Air received any compensation from Six to Start to publish this review. I just like the app and wanted to share it with you.)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *