Here’s a quirky game to have on your radar. Finnish founded Two Men and a Dog Games have soft-launched their first game, Zombie Catchers, and have also become Reaktor Polte’s first investment into a gaming company.
When trying to explain this game to you, picture them trying to explain this game to their investors. The whole concept is an alien and a robot have opened up a lemonade stand in a post-zombie apocalypse future where they juice zombies and sell it to an endless waiting line of hovercars.
To source these zombies, you jump down to a side-scrolling level where you drop brains around zombie holes to lure them out, where you then try to shoot them with your harpoon gun or other silly weapons. With these zombies caged up, you can then buy different types of juicers and upgrade them to rake in more money.
We’ve been playing this game since it first came on our radar, and after pumping a good week or two into it, we can say there’s not much more to the game. The zombie catching is repetitive and it takes a decent amount of time to level up enough to see new maps and types of zombies. Despite that, you keep coming back which is testament to the great quirky character design and overall silliness of the game. Like Alpaca Evolution you come back and grind just to see what happens next.
“With so many zombie games on the market, we wanted to add our own twist to the popular subject matter and create a strong and interesting world, which is often neglected in mobile games,” says CEO Matti Kallonen and former Developer at White Sheep Isobar. “The old Lucas Arts adventure games and cartoons like Futurama were the main inspirations for the atmosphere and theme of Zombie Catchers.”
The name of the company points to why they went to Reaktor, a digital services agency with an investment arm, for their funding. With former Rovio employee Aleksi Räisänen making up the other half of the team until now Two Men and a Dog have been only two men (and a dog) so they tell us Reaktor’s skillset has been an asset to them since meeting in June. Previously the company has received angel investment supported by Tekes.
Right now the game is only available in Finland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and they’re currently localizing and adding in more content for a global launch. Right now, the team is on a trip to China after being selected as a finalist in leading Chinese publisher SkyMobi’s indie developer program. SkyMobi will help the winners of the program localize their product and guarantee them at least five million downloads and 100,000 dollars revenue. The winners will be announced during this trip, so Two Men and a Dog will find out soon.
