How Yet Another Zombie Survivors Draws Catharsis and Balance from Outrageous Imbalance

As you’ll know if you came across my recent preview, I’m a Yet Another Zombie Survivors addict. During my short breaks between massacres, I’ve been pondering exactly how this thing got me so hooked. Now, maybe it’s because my brain is still blissfully addled by images of soaring severed limbs and apocalyptic laser beams, but the best theory I can come up with is that the game is so outrageously unbalanced that it ends up being both impossibly satisfying and perfectly, y’know, balanced. Makes sense, right?

If you didn’t catch that preview (how dare you?) and you’re not familiar with the game (how dare you?), it’s a reverse bullet hell, top-down horde shooter that asks only one thing of you: keep your team of survivors away from the thousands-strong army of zombies. Don’t worry about aiming and shooting, that’s automatic. So there’s nought but a single analogue stick for controls. Oh, and one other button to choose upgrades as you level up. Simple. So simple, you might worry that it would get boring. Yeah, no, it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. 

If you’ve played Vampire Survivors, the pixely populariser of this rapidly growing subgenre, you’ll find that Yet Another Zombie Survivors gets hectic far quicker and makes you the aggressor. Or at least, the more effective aggressor. During the opening stanza, you’re likely to be the one chasing down the baddies — wimpy and few in number as the poor bastards are — and rightly so. “Reverse bullet hell” implies that you are the boss. You’re the one with the firepower, so it makes sense that you should be on the hunt, at least for a while.

And therein lies the imbalance. To give an example, the first survivor I progressed to rank 3 was the Engineer, which unlocks his Big Blue Shield of Proper Bloody Nastiness (not its official name, but should be). And I sense you’re currently making an ass of you and me by assuming that this is a defensive move. The Engineer laughs in nerd at your lack of imagination. No, this marvel of unfairness just outright kills weak enemies and freezes most others in place. Yep, just completely immobilises them the moment they lay so much as a necrosed flap of skin on the electrified perimeter.

The vast majority of the horde have only a single, limp melee attack in their arsenal, so when you take away movement, they’re about as much use as a plaster on a zombie bite. And once you’ve upgraded the shield during a run, it spends more time active than it does on cooldown, so when you have the Engineer in your squad, you can merrily skip through fields of undead like they’re daisies in a meadow. 

When I first discovered the Shield of Nastiness, I thought, “Oh, the devs fudged this up”. Because, of course, every player will take the Engineer. Obviously. He makes a mockery of one of the most disturbing, terror-inducing mythical monsters we’ve devised as a species. That TV show wouldn’t have had quite the same impact if it had been called The Standing Dead. But here’s where I leave you stunned with jaw dangling like a zapped zomboid: I don’t even use the Engineer any more. Gasp!

That’s right, there are other characters equally or more unfair. How about the Huntress, who very rarely sits out of my runs these days. Her bow and arrows seem pretty tame initially: slow rate of fire, one kill at a time. Pretty pants, frankly. But 10 minutes later, the horde would be forgiven for throwing up their spindly arms and calling it a day, because by that time, the weapon is devastating. With the ice and multishot upgrades, you unleash three area-of-effect arrows simultaneously, which, in combination with the penetration skill, basically means freezing layer after layer of writhing rank and file, dealing serious damage, and halving their speed in the process. Even the big fellas — who eat the Shield of Nastiness for breakfast — are affected just the same as the grunts. How’s that fair?

Go on, let’s do one more. Whip the Medic out for a different type of OP. Forget offence, just upgrade her persistent health recovery ability, pair it with the life-steal one, which periodically kicks in to transfer the damage you deal to enemies back into your own HP bar, and wave goodbye to all your worries. This technique is less like frolicking in the pastures and more like punching a wasp nest while wearing a beekeeping suit. It feels a bit risky, but if you have faith in your toolkit, you’ll probably be totally fine. After all, you’ll recover a huge chunk of health literally every second, and even if you do walk face-first into a perfect storm of teeth, claws, and vomit, the defibrillator will just kick in and get you back on your feet instantaneously.

You can see what I’m getting at. The moment you decide that one character is superior to the others, you realise that the next one is stupid powerful as well. Quite a ballsy way to balance the player characters — just make them all unfair. The beauty of this approach is that it perfectly suits the power fantasy dopamine-fest Awesome Games Studio were shooting for, and allows the player to choose from a few meaningfully different kinds of catharsis. If you dedicate your build to raw firepower, there’s usually a point in the run when you grab that final, all-important upgrade that gives your team such a blistering ballistic output that the momentum of the entire scene shifts. Suddenly, you can stop running around and instead just stand your ground unleashing hell. You’ll vaporise those lumbering losers before they get anywhere near you.

If you’re being a bit more strategic by slowing the enemy down or setting traps, that momentum shift might come later, or, if you’re focusing on healing, maybe not at all. But even then, you’re rewarded with a different brand of satisfaction. Either way, you’ll get your kicks, and it’ll be glorious. 

What I haven’t mentioned thus far, of course, is that eventually, the zombos do get their shit together. The Endless mode goes on until you become one with the horde, so clearly those overtuned abilities have their limits. But there’s a fantastic, precarious, unbalanced balance to it, and even in the final moments when enemies rocket onto the screen with preposterous health pools and nearly one-shot claw power, you still feel like a force to be reckoned with, just one that can ultimately be felled. That is, for about 30 seconds until you start your next rampage.