ALL FLESH MUST BE EATEN (AFMBE) is just a great title. In today's competitive RPG market, a game needs something to grab your attention. For me, it was the "must". Not "will", or "can", or "maybe", but MUST BE EATEN. I like the imperative-ness of that statement.
As you might guess, AFMBE is about zombies and zombie worlds (I guess you might think it is about cannibals or some vegan nightmare, but no, it's zombies). Part RPG and part zombie-fic, AFMBE immerses you in a world where the dead have taken control. Unlike in D&D, zombies are more resilient than the player characters are, so surviving a zombie outbreak is no small thing. A point of clarification - fantasy zombies tend to be of the Haitian variety (as the AFMBE explains) - corpses raised from the dead to do their master's bidding. George Romero zombies, OTOH, generally carry some sort of infection that is spread by saliva and blood. Kind of like a cross between rabies and Ebola; and that spells "good times" for your players.
AFMBE is at its heart a very simple game, because there's really only 4 things in a deadworld (where zombies are rising from the grave) live people, dead people, guns, and food. If you're really hard core, throw in the weather and make it 5. There's just not a lot else to be said, so AFMBE goes for light on the mechanics and heavy on the atmosphere. After all, if there's nothing more to your gaming needs than enemies who come in waves and don't dodge shotgun blasts, computer software will fill your needs more efficiently (and hey, who doesn't like that sort of thing)?
AFMBE starts all its chapters with a little zombiefic. Good job setting the mood, nothing I was sorry to spend my life reading. The first chapter opens with "what are zombies" As I mentioned above, you will think of zombie very differently if you read Haitian voodoo or George Romero. AFMBE explains different sources of the zombie mythology and where you can go for your own sources. The second chapter starts with you - making your character. The system is Unisystem, which reminds me a lot of the oriignal Deadlands. It has a lot in common with White Wolf's Storyteller system, or at least more than it has with D&D. A character has attributes, skills, merits, and flaws. You have so many points to spend on your character, or you can choose from archetypes (the cheerleader, the jock, the drifter, etc.) who have points distributed and pre-made personalities. The latter option allows for greater simulation of being in a zombie movie; everybody has their role to play. Plus, it gives you an idea of what good chararcters look like.
Next comes a section on other parts of Unisystem than character generation. Things like fighting, running, effects of poisons, falling, drowning, the usual. Unisystem has a target difficulty that you have to achieve with the best die in your pool; so you get to roll a lot of dice, but only the high score keeps. The next section covers weapons (after all, you can't run away from the zombies forever). It mainly discusses different kinds of weapons and their relative strengths (for instance, you could find a chair leg anywhere, while a gun is very powerful and has rapid reload, but a sword never runs out of ammo...) as well as the dice pool for each weapon.
Having covered people and weapons, the only thing left to explore in the world is zombies (food can be left to your Zombie Master's discretion...). You want your zombies to have different qualities depending on what kind of game you want to run. If you want monster horror, you might want fast zombies with low cunning. On the other hand, if you want a lot of group infighting your zombies should be slow and stupid (but inexorable and in mass quantities). If you want a mystery game, you could have zombies you can't transmit the infection, but everything that dies eventually rises. So the characters might be looking for a cure or just trying to escape the local area. The zombies in AFMBE have different point levels attached to levels of powers (cunning, speed, strength, infectiousness) and the total point level of your zombies should give an idea of how much challenge your characters are facing. There are certainly some interesting variations on the standard zombie.
Where I think AFMBE really shines is the inclusion of "deadworlds", where zombies are overrunning the world. There are some very creative scenarios for the characters to be stuck in. This also provides a broader usefulness to AFMBE. I'm not sure I want to convince my gaming group to give Unisystem a try, but we could run D20 characters, World of Darkness characters, or any other system in one of the deadworlds provided and using custom zombies with powers from the tables to choose from. It makes a nice zombie supplement for any gaming system.