Thanks for the comments and feedback - really helpful.
Believe it or not it’s not a looping death animation. It’s a weird Emerald AI bug that I’ve not managed to track down yet. It happens on two of the zombies, but very infrequently on one of them and reasonably frequently, but not always on another. I have no idea what is causing it :-(
I agree re the controller, it has strengths and weaknesses. Yolan built that and I had real difficulty controlling it, especially when going for the downstroke to kill the crawlers. I plan to use it as the NPC controller in my own game so I won’t need to worry as much about it there ;-)
It’s awesome that you played it a bit more ‘cos it was fun. That’s not usually the way with Game Jam games! The goal was indeed to be like diablo / gauntlet legends. The intention was to give upgrades to team members to make them stronger. The mechanic is in there (hit F1, F2, F3) but we only ever got the time for one powerup - the health pack :-(