If you dig Vampire Survivors, you’re going to want to have Yet Another Zombie Survivors on your radar. Sure, its title may be terrible, but don’t let that put you off. This stylish zombie-killing game brings the auto-killing joy of Vampire Survivors to the modern apocalypse, and we absolutely cannot get enough.
Launching into Early Access this week, Yet Another Zombie Survivors tasks you with surviving through the night of a zombie attack. Starting out with just a few stray zombies, things quickly escalate, and within a few minutes you’ve got huge hordes, ginormous boss-like enemies, swarms of insects and poison-spitting undead. Needless to say, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
Helpfully, just like in Vampire Survivors, each zombie you kill brings you closer to your next upgrade. As you gain experience, you’ll unlock new weapons and abilities, making you stronger against your enemies. You have a few starting characters to choose from, each with their own loadout of skills. The Tank, for example, has a powerful shotgun as their starting weapon, but it’s their weaponised drones that spin around them as they move that really set them apart. Our favourite might be the Engineer, though, with their powerful Tesla gun which can send ripples of electricity through multiple enemies at once.
You don’t necessarily have to choose one over the other in Yet Another Zombie Survivors, though. While you start out with just one character, you get the opportunity to pick up two more survivors as you play. The classes you’ll encounter will be random – looks like there’ll be nine altogether, and we have six unlocked so far – but your full team of three becomes a formidable force with a range of skills that can all complement each other. Ultimately, you’ll likely have a set of ranged and melee weapons along with some powerful skills – we’re talking helicopter air raids and grenade strikes – that really help you clear the crowds.
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Being Early Access, though, content for Yet Another Zombie Survivors is a little thin on the ground right now. While the menu has space for five environments, only one is currently available: the Isolated City. It’s your standard ruined-city-in-a-zombie-apocalypse fare: dark, gritty and filled with broken roads and collapsed buildings. Not that you get much time to take it in while you’re avoiding the ever-growing hordes of the undead. We’re looking forward to new locations becoming available, though.
There are three game modes currently available: the Default mode, which challenges you to survive through the night, an Endless mode, and a Hardcore version of default. There’s little difference in how any of them play out: all three throw ever-growing hordes of enemies at you, with regular pick-ups to collect. Of course, Default and Hardcore both have an endpoint if you’re strong enough to survive the night. If you’ve managed to survive once, you’ll likely find yourself gravitating towards Endless mode to challenge your own best time. At least until more levels are added, of course.
As basic as its gameplay may be, there’s something alluring and addicting about Yet Another Zombie Survivors. Sure, it’s not exactly original – and the game’s name itself even references that fact. But it doesn’t stop it being an absolute blast to play. Even in its current, barebones state, there’s enough content to keep us coming back for more – and we’ll be keeping a close eye on updates dropping throughout its Early Access stint.
Yet Another Zombie Survivors is available on Steam in Early Access from 13th July.
