Zombie Blast Crew is a pleasingly tactile, arcadey game. Using a virtual stick to get around and a button to fire (plus a few more to use your gear), your input boils down to moving and killing, like a shark. But that doesn’t mean the game is entirely without tactical depth.
This guide will help you understand the myriad elements and features you’ll be introduced to when you first boot up Zombie Blast Crew.
Overview
If you’ve played a mobile game in the last ten years, you’ve probably encountered the kind of gameplay loop that Zombie Blast Crew is built on.
You play a stage, collect coins, gain XP, level up, spend your loot on upgrading your equipment, and so on in an escalating dance of gameplay difficulty and personal capability.
Each mission has a primary objective and a couple of side goals. Primary objectives vary from rescuing hostages to salvaging supplies to simply killing zombies, while secondary objectives task you with keeping your health over a certain level, killing a certain number of zombies, and so on. You get a star for each completed objective.
The game also contains a shop where you can buy upgrade cards, coins, and chests, and an event mode where you can play in three different contests for potentially huge coin and gem rewards.
Characters
Zombie Blast Crew features five unique characters. Each one comes with its own weapon, as well as differing health, damage, range, and speed ratings.
Michael is the one you start with. As you’d expect, he’s an everyman, with average attributes across the board. Like every character, he has a special ability: killing zombies makes his gear cool down more quickly.
Next up is Bill (level 6 unlock). Bill wields a shotgun. While this has a decent range, it’s only really effective at close quarters. It’ll easily take out multiple zombies with a single blast. Bill moves slowly, but he can absorb a lot of punishment. Killing zombies replenishes his health.
Karen (level 11 unlock) is rocking a flamethrower, which is devastating at close range but ineffective at a distance. Karen is a fast mover who takes damage easily. Interestingly, she becomes deadlier when weakened, an attack bonus being applied when her health falls under 50%.
Vanessa (level 15 unlock) carries a rocket launcher, which has both excellent range and high damage. Like Karen, she moves quickly to compensate for her relative vulnerability to damage. Unlike the other characters, her health automatically tops up as you play.
Javier (level 25 unlock) is fairly weak, and not particularly fast, but his weapon is phenomenally powerful at every range. It takes a second to get going, but after that the zombies fall like daisies.
You can swap between these characters between stages, tailoring your personnel to your objectives. However, the combat is mostly close quarters, meaning power is probably the most important attribute overall, along with resilience. We recommend investing in Karen.
Zombies
You may be surprised to learn that not all zombies are alike. Zombie Blast Crew contains a wide variety of distinct zombie species, characterized by their own unique appearances and behaviors.
Plain – these ultra common zombies swarm like murderous humanoid bees.
Runner – these tricky customers are capable of running and attacking at the same time.
Toxic – these noxious fellows inflict damage simply by virtue of being surrounded by a toxic green cloud.
Housewife – these zombies throw knives at you, which is apparently something that housewives do.
Anarchist – these zombies throw bricks, like rioting malcontents.
Bomber – these zombies throw bombs, like well-armed malcontents.
Punk – these zombies throw Molotov cocktails, like Russian anarchists.
Firefighter – these zombies swivel around holding axes, like murderous helicopters.
Footballer – these zombies charge in your direction, hoping to score (kill) a goal (you).
In general you’ll spend your time furiously backpedalling, circle-strafing, and dodging the zombie horde. However, it’s worth going after the ones that throw stuff.
Gear
Characters take a loadout of three items of gear into battle. At the start of the game these are a grenade, a health pack, and a gun turret, with more becoming available as you level-up. They all have cooldown timers of varying lengths. Here they are:
Grenade: inflicts splash damage, quite heavily, and it has a shortish cooldown. Particularly effective against crowds, which is great because zombies love to congregate.
Gun turret: fires automatically at zombies from a fixed point. Less effective than you might expect, but worth placing when you have to remain at a single location, while salvaging supplies or waiting for your evac chopper. Takes a while to cool down, but that’s not necessarily a problem since a turret lasts a little while.
Health pack: restores a percentage of your health.
Minefield (level 3 unlock): lays down a cluster of ten mines, which explode on contact with zombie scum. Fairly ineffective but, like the sentry gun, worth deploying when you’ve got to remain at a single point.
Airstrike (level 8 unlock): a bombing run that can kill or severely weaken multiple zombies at once. Highly effective for thinning out a crowd.
Explosive decoy (level 21 unlock): a clown toy that lure zombies over to have a look before exploding in their faces. Effective on paper in terms of damage and blast radius, but strangely unreliable in the field.
Stimpack (level 21 unlock): like the drug in Limitless, temporarily makes you invincible and super-fast. A long cooldown, which is understandable given the powers it bestows on you, but great while it lasts.
Coins
Coins are the main currency in Zombie Blast Crew. You pick them up during stages by killing zombies, receive them in big chests and mega chests, and get boatloads for taking part in events.
Another method of getting coins is to spend gems, either on big chests and mega chests or directly, by buying bundles. Gems are as hard to come buy as gold is, however, so you probably won’t use this route much.
You need coins for levelling up your characters and your gear, but you also need…
Upgrade cards
Upgrade cards are peculiar to characters, weapons, and items, and you can’t upgrade anything without having enough of the card in question. Plus, the higher the level the more cards you need.
You can two random cards after each stage, as well as in the free chest that becomes available every six hours. You get more in big chests and mega chests, and you can buy cards with gold in the shop.
General tips
- Don’t make the mistake of assuming that every character can be levelled up to some kind of parity. That’s how it works to a point, but early characters like Michael simply don’t have the potential to match the more heavily armed characters, however much you spend on them, so you might as well ignore them.
- Because you need both gold and upgrade cards to upgrade characters, you can sometimes find yourself with a surfeit of upgrade cards for characters you don’t actively use. Don’t be tempted to upgrade them for the sake of it. You’re better off saving your coins. Ditto gear.
- In the field, there are zombies that chase you and zombies that throw stuff at you. Some of the ones that throw stuff at you foreshadow their attacks with red circles. Obviously, remove yourself from these, and go after the chuckers before they whittle your health down from afar.
- Stay on the move, backpedalling and circle-strafing so that you can fire as you run away. Standing still means instant death in the zombie apocalypse.
- Play the event modes. You might not particularly care about leaderboards, but you know what you do care about? Loot and rewards. And that’s what you’ll get in abundance if you put a little bit of time into the events.
- The upgrade cards you’re looking for can be hard to come by, since the chests you receive contain random assortments. You can improve your odds, however, by going to the shop and paying a gem per shuffle to change the available selection.
- You can massively increase your haul of coins and cards by watching a few ads. It’s well worth the small inconvenience.
Try out these tips for yourself by downloading Zombie Blast Crew on the App Store (and Google Play) right now. Hop to it!