Press Start Studios have definitely made a splash with Twin Blades, their debut game available on Xbox LIVE and iTunes. You play as a zombie killing nun. That sentence alone sold the game to me. Just read it one more time – a nun, that kills zombies. Brilliant.

The most striking element of Twin Blades is the graphics. For an indie game Press Start Studios have made it look very polished, even more so than some full price arcade games. I’m not a huge fan of manga but it works really well with the games style. The zombies are similar to the style of PopCap’s Plants Vs. Zombies with bright colours and cartoon violence, that is until you swing at them with your scythe and they explode in variety of pleasing ways. As you work your way through the levels you can expect to see zombies armoured up with a variation of kitchen appliances, Hawaiian clothing, and even the odd skeleton thrown in to make up the numbers.

The game does lack a story as you work your way through 31 days of a zombie apocalypse – I only lasted 11 days without dying. You move across the screen from left to right in standard side scrolling fashion killing everything in your way. Each level consists of the market, graveyard, church, and the edge of the town – all lovingly designed to match the games manga style. The game-play offers up enough variety to keep you interested though.

The nun has two weapons – a scythe and a gun – you use these as well as a jump button to work through the levels. At the end of each level you can buy upgrades and new weapons at the shop by cashing in your harvested zombie hearts (what sort of shop is this?). Flame gun, ice gun – and my favourite – the holy beam, are some of the weapons on sale. You can’t just run through the level blasting everything with your pocket Hammer Of Dawn as you only have limited action points, which have to be recharged by hacking away with the scythe. Shame really.

The first week will grant you with little challenge as the zombies can be easily disposed off with a few swings of the blade, but as the days go by the number and power of the zombies continues to rise. Basically, it gets bloody hard. You will be jumping and slashing, spinning around to shoot the pan-head zombie that’s swinging his ladle at the back of your head only to be greeted with a fresh swathe of zombies erupting from the earth before you. I had to – and hopefully you will too – just run away from certain fights. It can be hard to deal with the crowds of zombies as the guns are better from long-range and the scythe is a little under-powered. I had to spam the jump-slash attack to work my way out. The game does drop some health potions during large fights which is a complete godsend.

It can get a little repetitive in places but thankfully you can pick up the pad and continue from where you died with all your tasty upgrades intact. In some aspects I think the game would have worked as well, if not a little better, in more short and sweet chunks – similar to Ska Studios I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 – but regardless of this Press Start have done a great job.

You get the feeling they wanted to do so much more with this game as they have maxed out the capacity of the standard indie game. Just think what they could have done with a bigger budget? I’ll be keeping my eyes on this up-and-coming developer as I think they may have big times ahead in 2010.

VideogameUK verdict: 8/10

You can download the demo, and purchase the full game, at Xbox.com.