Yet Another Zombie Survivors Review — Dead Ahead

The first thing I noticed when I booted up Yet Another Zombie Survivors was the game’s style.

Veering away from the new tradition of overtly serious, gritty zombie apocalypses, Yet Another Zombie Survivors instead goes for a more classically inspired, campy, comic-book-style approach to the world’s most popular version of a global pandemic. The game is unapologetic in its style, forgoing realistic depictions of suffering and social issues in a post-apocalyptic world in favor of Tesla rifles, saw-blade-wielding drones, and attack helicopters.

This deviation from the popular norm in zombie media works well because Yet Another Zombie Survivors isn’t like many other zombie games on the market right now.

Yet Another Zombie Survivors fits comfortably into the Survivors category, as opposed to the “survival” genre many other zombie games fall into. Instead of crafting, base building, and pondering how many days you have left before thirst, hunger, madness, or the hordes of undead take you, you instead take a more proactive approach to finality, mowing down hordes left and right and seeing how long you can last before your “go big or go home” approach sends you packing.

If you’ve played Vampire Survivors, or many of the other Bullet Heaven titles I’ve reviewed, then you’re already familiar with the gameplay loop. Load into a level with a selected hero and see how long you can last against progressively harder and larger waves of enemies, with each one dropping XP that sends you up a progressively more expensive tree of procedurally selected upgrade options. Start the match with nothing but a pistol and end it with homemade mayhem the likes of which man has never seen before, and see if you can last a full twenty minutes while you’re at it.

What sets Yet Another Zombie Survivors really sets itself apart from other games in the genre is its unique squad-building mechanic.

Instead of playing as one hero in each run, Yet Another Zombie Survivors has you collect a group of three throughout. Each character has their own set of skills to unlock, as well as their own primary fire feature, and their skill trees only become more expansive as you level them up, which is something that can only be done by giving them actual playtime in your runs. Your three survivors move as a single entity, but they each come with their own abilities and cooldown timers, meaning a full squad has a lot more going on than a single person.

“But Erik,” I hear you ask, “how is having three separate skill trees all that different than other survivor games that just let you have a bunch of abilities at once?” That’s a good question, and frankly, I don’t really know what the answer is. There is surely some nuance in the mechanic that I don’t understand, but I can tell you that something definitely felt different with the game’s approach.

What’s more, each character serves as, well, a unique character. You can go back to the hub menu and watch them interact, which is a fun little feature I was glad to discover.

These characters are by far the best part of Yet Another Zombie Survivors. They each stand out from each other as more than just a series of different abilities; they have actual personality that is communicated to you, first through visual language and later through the character interactions and little written blurbs before missions. It is a choice that definitely makes the title stand out from others in the genre, and in a good way.

That said, the game doesn’t meaningfully improve the Bullet Heaven genre’s main gameplay loop. If you’re a fan of the genre, you’re in for more of the same, and that’s just fine. There isn’t anything here that will make a fan out of someone who isn’t already fond of the genre, though.

The game’s grind, which you progress through to unlock new upgrades, maps, and characters, can feel especially slow and tedious to get through. Upgrading characters is particularly time-consuming, demanding a significant investment of time before you can unlock what is arguably much of the game’s main content.

Progressing through this grind unfortunately becomes tedious really quickly, and I have to say there wasn’t a whole lot to re-inspire me once the fun started to burn out. This typically happens for me in Bullet Heaven titles, and sometimes something inspires me to come back and give it another go. The thrill of unlocking new characters is usually what does it for me. In the case of Yet Another Zombie Survivors, however, I didn’t really feel this call, and when the game started to get boring, it simply stayed boring, and I wasn’t drawn back to it.

Yet Another Zombie Survivors is a perfectly fine, downright good Bullet Heaven game, and one where its unique characters are its strongest point. Its themes are unique, but I can’t say the gameplay does too much to reinvent the genre. Fans of the genre are likely to enjoy it, but they may find the grind becomes a little tedious and, if you’re anything like me, won’t be too drawn to come back to the game once it gets a little boring. However, if the game looks cool to you and you’re thinking about buying it, I absolutely recommend giving it a try, especially while it’s on sale for a generous $10, at the time of writing.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Yet Another Zombie Survivors. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Yet Another Zombie Survivors is available on Steam and Xbox.