Quick Verdict
Yet Another Zombie Survivors is one of the most polished survivors-likes I’ve played, a squad-based take on the genre that exits three years of Early Access absolutely nailing the game feel so many of its peers miss. Between the three-character teams, the mission objectives, and a generous spread of arenas and modes, the game kept me entertained for 35 hours, and at $14.99, it’s an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys the genre.
That said, this isn’t a game you come to for build depth or theorycrafting. Once your team is assembled and the skill trees start filling out, the upgrade decisions mostly stop mattering, and the RNG that defines games like Megabonk barely factors in here. Whether that’s a strength or a weakness depends entirely on how you feel about luck deciding your runs, but either way, there’s a very grindy 100 hours here for completionists.
Dead Simple
Every few months, I love to sink my brain into a survivors-like, especially when I’m looking for a more casual gaming experience after a stretch of bigger releases. Ironically, I ignored Yet Another Zombie Survivors when it first launched into Early Access because, well, it sounded like yet another zombie survivors game. When it hit 1.0 on August 20, though, I decided to give it a shot, since I had a bit of an empty gap waiting for Star Wars Zero Company and wanted a reset after playing so many games recently.
The first thing that struck me within minutes of my opening run was how smooth everything felt. Unlike other survivors-likes, Yet Another Zombie Survivors gives your character a decent starting move speed, so you don’t spend your first several levels feeling like you’re wading through molasses until you can dump points into movement. I was also really impressed by the presentation, from the subtle effects when leveling up to how punchy all the sound effects are. This game nails the “game feel” I always look for, where everything is satisfying to do despite the gameplay being very limited. After all, you could set it up so you’re just walking around while the game handles the aiming for you.
Squad Ghouls
The game’s spin on the formula is that you end up assembling a team of three characters rather than piloting a single hero. You start each run with one Survivor and rescue two more as the run progresses, with each character bringing their own suite of weapons and powerups into combat. There are nine Survivors in total (SWAT, Tank, Engineer, Huntress, Ghost, Medic, Pyro, Mechanic, and Ranger), and their skill trees include synergy nodes, so bringing certain combinations of characters can result in some cool synergies. For me, those team synergies ended up being more exciting than anything I pulled out of a chest.
While the Survivors all have different archetypes, many of them don’t feel inherently different to play, in the sense that some of their skills are just reskins with the same effect and a different element attached. The Huntress’s zombie decoy, for example, is fundamentally the same as Ghost’s holo-bait, except one is a grenade and the other electrocutes. This is forgivable, though, since these skills fire off on their own and don’t really affect how the game feels from moment to moment.
No Brainer
What I didn’t like is how you’ll eventually get everything you want for each character, which means there isn’t a lot of strategy in deciding which powerups to level. Really, the first few levels are the only important ones, because you need to be strong enough to survive until your full team of three is assembled. After that, I found myself just selecting whichever option I wanted, because you’ll always get enough levels to power everything up. It’s a familiar feeling from my Ball x Pit review, where my biggest criticism was that I wanted more difficult choices whenever I leveled up.
This is really different from other games in the genre, which typically have a giant pool of upgrades and restrictions based on time. In Yet Another Zombie Survivors, the RNG comes from what’s in the chests, but with eight equipment slots, it’s also pretty easy to end up with eight usable items, and I generally just picked the best of the three options while gravitating toward raw stat increases like more crit damage or faster cooldowns. This is the first survivors-like where I didn’t find a lot of value in rerolling or banishing, which makes it the polar opposite of Megabonk, where, as I said in my review, RNG is king and most runs are about adapting to what you’re given. If you’re someone who hates it when bad luck ruins a run, this is the game for you, because it feels like if you can survive the first four minutes, you’ll be fine for the rest of the run.
Mission Creeps
The only times I felt compelled to reroll or banish anything were when I was trying to satisfy a mission objective, which conveniently brings me to one of the game’s better ideas. Instead of just dropping into a map and mindlessly wandering around until I’m powerful enough to destroy everything on the screen, Yet Another Zombie Survivors has missions and objectives you can pick up in the hub, so each playthrough doesn’t feel so routine. Some of these missions aren’t that deep, with objectives you’ll easily complete on the way to finishing runs that last 10 to 20 minutes, but others will lock in your starting character, arena, and game mode. Those missions felt more fun to do, since I had to actually pay attention to the objectives. It’s a nice layer of variety.
As for the story content, where you can chat with the other characters in the hub, I wouldn’t say it’s very deep. The writing is very simple, and I guess some of the chats can be slightly amusing, but I honestly stopped checking them after a dozen or so conversations. There is a story tied to the missions as well, but nothing I would call memorable. It’s cool that it’s there, which is more than you can say about most survivors-likes, but don’t let it be the reason you’re buying the game.
Modes of the Dead
Where the game makes up for its thin builds is in the sheer variety of ways it gives you to play. There are five arenas, some with their own gimmick, like trains running on a track or a giant sandworm that clearly takes inspiration from Dune. As for modes, there’s the default 20-minute run, an Endurance endless mode that gets harder the longer you play, a 10-minute Hardcore run, Extermination, a wave-based mode where you have to clear all the enemies in each wave before advancing, and Boss Rush, which gives you 10 minutes to assemble your build before fighting the most powerful enemy for that area.
There are also two bonus modes rounding things out, and they sit at opposite ends of the difficulty spectrum. Infinite disables most achievements but removes the time limit and tilts the rules in your favor, while One Hit asks you to survive a gauntlet of enemy attacks lasting five-plus minutes, where any single hit ends your run. Add in 257 in-game achievements at the time of writing, plus leaderboards to chase once you’re done with everything, and there’s plenty here. Just know this is a very grindy game if you want to unlock all the powerups in every tree for every character. You’ll probably be playing for 100 hours to do all that.
Grave Expectations
One thing worth mentioning is how good a job this game’s presentation does at keeping the graphical noise down. There are some survivors-likes where you’ll lose track of your character or projectiles because of everything happening on the screen, and Yet Another Zombie Survivors avoids that mess very well in my opinion. For the most part, you will not get lost in the chaos, and I definitely didn’t encounter any deaths where I felt like it wasn’t my fault. If I died, I knew it was because I ran into something I shouldn’t have.
Without question, I would recommend Yet Another Zombie Survivors to anyone who enjoys survivors-likes. It’s a very polished game that runs very well on the Steam Machine, and while I didn’t get a chance to test it on my Steam Deck, I assume it’ll run well there too. As I said in my Halls of Torment review, part of that game’s magic is that you can always make something work, and Yet Another Zombie Survivors pushes that accessibility even further, for better and for worse. If you want a survivors-like where the odds are stacked in your favor and every run is yours to lose, this is $14.99 well spent. Just don’t judge it by its name like I did.
Yet Another Zombie Survivors has an official release date of August 20, 2026, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X|S, and PC, with a Switch version to follow. This review is based on a review code provided by developer Awesome Games Studio, played on PC. While FullCleared does have affiliate partnerships, they do not influence our editorial content. We may earn a commission for purchases made through links on this page.
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