Yet Another Zombie Survivors Preview

It’s difficult to put my thoughts about this game into words. Not because the premise is complex or the mechanics nuanced, but because I can’t stop playing the damn thing long enough to type. That’s probably all you need to know, but I’ll elaborate a little bit just to make sure. 

Yet Another Zombie Survivors, currently in Early Access, is a top-down, reverse bullet hell shooter in which you, surprisingly, shoot zombies to survive. If, like me, that “reverse bullet hell” bit is new to you, here’s the tea. In contrast to classic shmups, where the player weaves between waves of hellish projectiles, this switcheroo genre puts the ridonculous weaponry in your hands. If it’s a power fantasy you’re after, prepare to be titillated.

For controls, think twin-stick shooter minus one of the sticks — aiming and firing are automatic, so movement is your only job. If that sounds too simplistic to be engaging, just know that your brain will barely have the bandwidth to keep you breathing during the final moments of a run, so chaotic and relentless is the action. It is bonkers.

Success in the standard game mode means keeping your team of “survivors” — a term that strikes me as a touch passive considering the assault rifles and death lasers and airstrikes at their disposal by the end — alive through an entire night, or 20 minutes in real-time. Things start out slow, possibly too slow for some, as the undead amble onto the scene one by one, and you chip away at them with your pea-shooting starter weapon. Gems dropped by zombies quickly net you level-ups, though, and then it gets fun. 

See, I lied earlier, you actually have two jobs: yes, movement, but also team construction. Before each run starts, you pick a leader from a roster of six characters (to be expanded in the release version). You can optionally recruit one or two more survivors from SOS beacons as the run progresses, but to start out, the leader’s on their own. Level-ups allow you to choose an upgrade from a randomised selection of three (roguelite style), usually a weapon buff or a passive ability — things like landmine drops every 30 seconds, recurring area-of-effect attacks, or, in the case of the Medic, health regeneration options. 

So from the very start, you’re planning a playstyle and selecting teammates and their abilities accordingly. Each character comes with such unique skills, experimenting with new party compositions and upgrade paths instantly opens up hours of playtime. And this isn’t irritating, trial-and-death playtime as you put run after run into failed builds. Every strategy I’ve cooked up so far has been totally viable, which either means I’m the Walter White of big-brained bullet-heaven builds or the game is extremely well-balanced. And I failed chemistry.

There’s a good variety of walking, charging, and exploding dead to deal with already. Bigger and nastier variants join the fray as you dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge your way towards the dawn. Even with less movement-oriented playstyles, you’re likely to be tapping away at the analogue stick constantly, save for the brief respite of levelling up or finding an item crate. 

The final two minutes of each run are my favourite because it’s then that all re-animated hell breaks loose and the strategy you’ve been cultivating gets truly tested. Zombies are at their fastest, deadliest, and most numerous. They swarm into the frame at a breakneck pace, checking your stick-wiggling skills as well as any plan Bs and Cs you’ve devised for when your initial line of defence (which is almost certainly a strong offence) fails to quell the onslaught. At times like these, it's risky just to glance over at your health bar or look for waypoints indicating crates and health pickups. If you take your eyes off your team for a single second, you might well get a nice big dollop of decaying phlegm to the face. And claws. Probably claws as well. 

Currently, only one map is available: the definitive square-shaped city scene. It’s a sensible move to keep the focus on the madness within the arena for now rather than complicating things with obstacles. Still, developer Awesome Games Studio appears to be planning at least a slightly more intricate map for the next big update, involving “new enemies and gameplay mechanics”.

The final version of the game will also introduce more unlockable skills for each character, which are limited to two tiers right now. And that’s just dandy because these upgrades sometimes singlehandedly allow for entirely new playstyles. Like the Engineer’s massive shield thing, which makes running through the horde in search of items much less terrifying.

How many hours of playtime you get out of Yet Another Zombie Survivors might depend on what motivates you as a player. The Endless mode provides an infinite army of undead for you to experiment with and progressively improve your survival time if that’s your thing. But even for those of us who typically move on when the more tangible goals run dry, there’re at least 10 hours of non-stop action here between the standard 20-minute survival and the condensed, 10-minute Hardcore mode, factoring in the joy of build experimentation. The release version should multiply all that several times over.

It will be important for Awesome Games to enhance the soundtrack in future updates; a single, passable rock song doesn’t quite keep the audio boredom at bay. Upcoming maps will need to up the difficulty a bit, too. While the latter half of any run feels like it could fall apart at any given moment, you’re likely to achieve a pretty high success rate overall once you’ve got a handle on the mechanics and secured some permanent upgrades, even on the Hardcore mode. Of course, we only have access to the very first area as yet, so that makes sense.

If Awesome Games continue the way they’ve started, Yet Another Zombie Survivors  could end up being the type of no-nonsense dopamine-fest that will hook you in and keep you away from all the important things you’re supposed to be doing with your time. I’ll be watching out for those updates from here to see how things progress. But for now, I must get back to levelling fields of undead before I get the shakes.