Taking place inside an unnamed cottage in unnamed woods, you play an unnamed man who is vacationing with his (named!) friends Cuthbert and Miriam. Shambling is soon heard, and Miriam goes out to investigate. Naturally, she is consumed by a zombie. Cuthbert, being a total coward, flees upstairs after explaining that the moon is causing the dead to rise. Armed with only a shotgun that you seem to carry around even when there's not zombies, you barricade yourself in and prepare for the assault.

Cottage of Doom definitely hits the spot with the audio and graphics for a B-movie. The two male actors do their voices hilariously bad, and Miriam doesn't even have a real voice as they didn't have a female voice actor. Instead, all her lines are spoken by Microsoft Sam. The most hilarious audio, however, belongs to the zombies. Instead of moaning, screaming, or doing anything menacing at all, they mumble "gruugruu" as the shamble. It's incredibly hilarious just because of how ridiculous it is. The rest of the audio is fairly standard, nothing special. The graphics, though, are very nice. The detail on the pixelated character and environment is excellent, and the animations are nice and smooth. There's even some awesome blood splatter effects for when you kill zombies.

Cottage of Doom is a game primarily about killing zombies and staying alive, so naturally you are going to want to barricade, stock up on ammo, and in general make yourself prepared for the zombie horde. There are four rooms in the house that each start off with the same configuration in terms of items placed and doors open. However, the game mixes things up by having your coward buddy throw stuff down to you for you to use in your defense of the cottage. These items are thrown into a random room, so keeping the whole cottage together is a definite must.

Items in Cottage of Doom are used primarily for one thing: breaking down. Breaking an item gives you an equal amount of shotgun shells and boards. Shotgun shells are used for shooting the zombies in the face, and boards are used to repair the doors and windows as the zombies damage or breach them. Things get really tense later as the zombie horde increases and you begin to run out of resources, but that's the whole point. This is not a game that has an ending other than death for the player. You must try and last as long as possible before you erupt in a shower of gore!

There's not much else to Cottage of Doom besides it's simple and addicting arcade sensibilities. With hilarious sound, good art direction, and addicting concept, it's a great way to kill some time while waiting for the zombie apocalypse to arrive. You can download the game from the official website or right here on Big Download. Sorry Mac and Linux users, this one is PCs only. If you liked the game, you may like this bit of trivia: Alex May coded the game Dyson, which was on Freeware Friday not too long ago!

For another look at freeware games, take a peek at Joystiq's Free Game Club weekly feature!