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Slick Minecraft-inspired visuals can’t save this dull zombie survival game

3K View2024-01-18

Survivors Of The Zombie World

6.9

SurvivalActionZombieArcadeShooter

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SHOULD I PLAY SURVIVORS OF THE ZOMBIE WORLD?

Skip it, unless you really like zombie games. Survivors of the Zombie World offers chaotic zombie-slaying that’s fun in short bursts, but that’s about it. The survival gameplay could be a big enough draw on its own, but the game also faces terrible issues like progression walls, exhausting grinding, and repetitive gameplay that add up to an insufferable experience.

TIME PLAYED

I played Survivors of the Zombie World for three hours. I completed eight story missions and more than a dozen survival mode matches. I’ve only acquired two weapons, but I’ve upgraded my pistol five times already.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT SURVIVORS OF THE ZOMBIE WORLD?

• It’s a zombie survival game. Like the name says, this game is all about surviving an onslaught of ugly-looking zombies. Survivors of the Zombie World features mechanics like hunger, stamina, and health that added extra challenge beyond fighting off the living dead. There are a lot of weapons and cosmetics to collect that provide a reason to continue playing, and the zombie-slaying action is fun for the first hour or two at least.

• Slaying zombies in a big battlefield. Since Survivors of the Zombie World requires minimal hardware and has simplified graphics, the battlefield is a lot more detailed and bigger than most zombie survival games out there. While it’s not the prettiest game, it provided a gigantic arena for me to fight off hordes of zombies in.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT SURVIVORS OF THE ZOMBIE WORLD?

• It gets boring real fast. Even though the game has four different playable modes—story, survival, defense, and online LAN—they basically all have the same gameplay: shooting zombies and trying to survive. And while that was fun at first, it got extremely boring and repetitive after an hour. I only played for a few hours, and even that was excruciating, especially once I realized what a grind it was going to be.

• So much grinding. Almost every cosmetic and weapon in Survivors of the Zombie World comes at a price. I hated having to grind multiple matches to earn enough resources to unlock just one weapon or upgrade. The drop rate for these resources is depressingly low to begin with; any given zombie might drop between seven to twenty coins. Given how expensive the weapons are, I spent a lot of time grinding my way through mobs of monsters and getting tremendously exhausted.

• Progression walls. This is a natural extension of the grinding problem paired with the difficulty curve in Survivors of the Zombie World. Story missions got harder as I progressed, which meant that I needed new and better weapons, which meant that I had to grind out the resources to purchase those weapons. These unavoidable progression walls made the already stale gameplay even more tiresome.