Zombie Waves is a top-down platformer offering simple joystick controls allowing you to move the way you want while unlocking powerups along the way. The idea of the game is quite simple – you need to survive for 10 minutes straight while killing as many zombies as possible. You’re given a gun – selectable pre-game, and a set of enhancements that unlock at different levels.
The bosses, or elites, also drop an enhancement that you can pick up to upgrade your gear. These enhancements are supposed to be one step above normal enhancements.
Enhancement Trees
While the enhancements do feel very random at times, there’s a set pattern to them, a tree of sorts, that- when unlocked fully, can lead to an ultimate enhancement. Some of these ultimates live up to their name, while others are an absolute waste of time. You’d mainly want to grab as many AoE style enhancements while retaining as much damage as possible.
Enhancements are not supposed to be your one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, some of them often lower your other stats in exchange for another. For example, you could be trading speed for damage or quantity for knockback and vice versa.
Weapons
In order to keep the “progression” element alive, the game serves you with a basic-level weapon from the start. The more you level these weapons up, the stronger they get. But pertaining to their rarity, there’s a level-up limit. Weapons go from normal to legendary and can be upgraded with the game’s progression currency.
This naturally entails that the stronger weapon you have, the easier time you will have progressing through the stages.
Currencies
Fortunately, Zombie Waves doesn’t bombard us with a wild assortment of currencies:
- Gold: The main currency called gold, and its primary purpose is to upgrade your weapons and equipment.
- Diamond-like Currency: It serves its purpose as the premium currency, unlocking chests, purchasing gold, and basically doing anything as long as it’s not directly affecting gameplay integrity.
- Intel-like Currency: Used for ranking up weapons and equipment.
Stages
Zombie Waves is not a hypercasual game, where a single level takes you to the end of the world. Instead, you’re given a stable assortment of stage-based progression. Each game has a 10-minute survival timer. There are different modes, but this generally does not change in the normal stage mode. The idea is to keep progressing through these while collecting their subsequent rewards to strengthen yourself.
Tips and Tricks to Excel at Zombie Waves
With the basic premise of the game understood, let’s strategize the best ways of defeating those wretched hordes of zombies. Hint: You simply need to survive, it’s that simple. But how you do it is what matters.
- Grab as Much Gold as Possible: This goes without saying, but Gold is your main mode of progression. With each stage cleared, you will have a lot of chances to collect gold either from the missions or the first-time clear rewards. However, just having the currency in stock isn’t enough. You need to be actively investing it wherever possible. Normally, this would mean you’d lose out on opportunities to upgrade stronger weapons. Luckily though, Zombie Waves has a mechanic in place that lets you reclaim all the gold you’ve invested in previous upgrades.
