"Hey Joe, we gotta get out of here!"
Dead Ahead: Zombie Warfare is the sequel to the mobile game Dead Ahead, developed by Mobirate and released on the Google Play Store in March 8th, 2017.— Sheriff Bill
Unlike it's predecessor, which is an endless side-scroller with several elements of Vehicular Combat with you running over unlucky zombies standing in your way while staying one step ahead of a never-ending horde of undead chasing you, Zombie Warfare is a strategy-based Tower Defense game based around sending out different units to destroy the barricade blocking the way of your bus, with two meters that will control your Unit summoning:
- Courage, which allows you to spawn most of the Units (survivors that are send out to directly damage the barricade and kill any enemy in their way) and automatically fills up.
- Rage, which allows you to spawn Support Items (inanimate objects and items that can benefit the Units in one way or another) and Rage-exclusive Units, and unlike Courage, it does not fill up on its own and must be gained through killing enemies. Once completely filled up, however, the player can then have Bill pop out from the bus with his LMG to mow down enemies.
The game, like the first one, takes place in the aftermath of a mysterious plague ravaging the world, a la The Walking Dead with tidbits of Left 4 Dead sprinkled on it, with you playing as Sheriff Bill, the (presumably) leader of a mobile survivor camp in the form of a repurposed school bus, and must travel through the desolate, undead-ridden landscape in pursuit of the source of the infection. The game's campaign contains eight different locations, each having at least a couple dozen missions with varying difficulty and zombie types. Each of these locations introduces new zombies, each with a unique gimmick and with increasing difficulty to take them out.
In addition to the main campaign, there are also several other game modes:
- Skirmish, which is the game's resident multiplayer mode. Here, you will be given 100 points of a Courage/Rage mix and all of the human Units you have currently so that you can set up a full team of whichever ones you see fit. Once done, they will be pitted against another player's team. With every win, you earn dog tags that will help you advance up the leaderboard.
- Events, which are weekly special in-game modes that require Event Tickets to be played. Currently, there are three events in the weekly rotation:
- Wall Mart, which takes place inside a megastore and has the player concerned with holding their ground against an endless horde of zombies, until their bus gets overrun. The more zombies are killed, the higher the score becomes.
- Princess Rescue, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Instead of Courage and human Units, the player only has the preset Support Items at their disposal to indirectly escort the designated 'Princesses', who are women fleeing to your bus. She cannot defend herself, meaning the player will have to protect her from encroaching enemies.
- Corn Farm, which plays like a regular Campaign level (destroy the barricade blocking the way), only that you have to fight the marauders, infected human enemies who are generally more resilient than zombies and possess firearms. With every barricade destroyed, more Marauders with higher levels begin to appear, higher quality Items are dropped, and the barricade's health will increase. Similar to Wall Mart, the more enemies killed, the higher the score, though only Marauder kills will contribute to the count.
Dead Ahead: Zombie Warfare provides examples of:
Tropes with their own pages:
- Aborted Arc: This happened to Marauders' plotline due to the final locations getting added much later after the game's release. We are yet to find out their goals, and the reason why they are trying to kill Bill's team.
- Action Bomb: Firefighter and Rebel zombies can explode on death. So do Grenadier, Juggernaut, and Firefighter (the human) among players' units.
- Always Chaotic Evil: The Marauders, who not only attack other humans but also turn on their own after they succumb to the infection.
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Displayed in Skirmish, where player units can move to the left, and in Supply Run, where enemies can move to the right.
- Artificial Stupidity: When it comes to combat, units' AI is painfully simple. They engage in fights only with enemies closest to them, ignoring anyone else standing by their side. And once they chose a target they lock onto it until it's dead, letting other enemies go past them. All these issues lead to a general lack of coherent teamwork. Instead, you'll often see several units ganging up on a single zombie, even if it's very weak.
- Attractive Zombie: Every explicitly female zombie.
- Downplayed with the "Girl" and EMT. Both of them are clearly feminine but wear baggy clothes and look messy.
- Subverted with Abby's zombie form, thanks to Body Horror.
- All There in the Manual: Many units used to have detailed backstories in the form of KTPlay developer blogs. All but one are deleted now, possibly due to copyright issues. note
- Ad Reward: The player can watch ads to gain bonus resources, like coins and fuel.
- Beef Gate: Putrid and Big Blue for location 7, and Crank for location 8. Both of these are huge tanks that deal high damage on hit. They appear in intro missions of the aforementioned locations, which can be unlocked before you even finish world 5.
- Begin with a Finisher:
- Mechanic comes out of the bus charging into enemies with a sledgehammer. It's a special attack that deals triple his usual damage, and also counts as a critical hit.
- Builder Abby spawns with a one-time use machine gun that deals massive damage per bullet. Once it runs out of ammo, she switches to melee and starts using a much weaker fire axe.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: Willy's, Soldier's, and cops' shields work as separate health bars. The Scout item set also allows to acquires said shields by killing enemies.
- Medic(Zombie) provides 30 Shield Points to any nearby zombies by expelling out gas within a small area
- Boring, but Practical:
- Redneck is the simplest Fighter available, with no flashy attributes other than fast preparation time, and even his level 13 ability is a mere movement speed increase. However, it doesn't stop him from being viable throughout the entire game, even outside of the team synergies he belongs to.
- Some team power synergies count as this. Especially the 2/2 ones.
- Mechanic's 2/2 repairs 5% of the bus's health whenever a Mechanic comes out of the bus. While the percentage seems small, it's more than enough to cheese out 3-star completion of every mission, since Hillbilly is a very spammable fighter, and most other members of the team are strong units on their own.
- Police's 2/2 makes every ranged unit have their magazine size doubled. When there's huge hordes of tanky zombies constantly pouring in, that added uptime of many gunners not having to reload can make a massive difference.
- Emergency 2/2 makes every unit have fire immunity (which includes lightning). While this sounds like a negligible upside, remember that this is the team with Lionheart, Firefighter, and Paramedic Nancy in it. It allows Lionheart to use his gas torch ability to burn bodies or activate his damage boost without risk to his teammates, and stops Firefighter's and Nancy's on-death strikes from harming their allies, with the latter's zombie form also becoming a non-threat. This makes Emergency 2/2 one of the few team powers that actually synergizes well with its members.
- Emergency 5/5 has all it’s members have 25% extra max health. The simple health increase helps out the heroic helpers a lot, considering they’re all front-line fighters, even if they don’t work well together as a team.
- Despite College being an underwhelming team, its 2/2 power can be a useful bonus. It stops all units from turning into zombies upon death. While there aren't that many dangerous on-death transformations, the ones that do exist are harsh. This team power stops Sonya and Medic from turning into the fast Witch, Diaz from turning into the tanky Cop, and Saw from turning into Monks immediately. It especially helps with Abby and Dr. Norman, who arguably have some of the most dangerous on-death turns in the game. Abby's undead form is essentially a downscaled Insectoid, and Slob's poisonous explosion can kill your entire team if his body stays close to them.
- Boss in Mook Clothing: For what it's worth, the Demon has a bit too much health to be considered a regular mook, at least by the standards of Location 4. What adds to his questionable status is his special ability to attack all units and stationary objects present on the battlefield, which does a fair bit of damage.
- Close-Range Combatant: All melee units. Willy counts too since his taser has a very short range.
- Downplayed with Flamethrower and Doctor Norman, whose weapon sprays don't go very far, but still reach much farther than the attacks of any melee.
- Combat Medic: The Medic, who has a fittingly quirky AI – her decision-making is a bit awkward, and she prefers shooting to dropping Medkits when needed. Paramedic Nancy shares this trait, being able to attack enemies with her medkit and heal/resurrect units with it when needed.
- Courteous Canadian: Northerners will randomly apologize after landing a kill if you run a team with their synergy active.
- Covers Always Lie: The game's icon features a massive tank zombie and a random police officer. These two characters don't appear in it at all, and nobody looks similar to them.
- Crippling Overspecialization:
- Firefighter, who exists specifically to counter enemies with poison, fire, and explosion damage. He is the only melee unit to posses such set of immunities, which makes him stand out among similar options. Firefighter is equipped well enough to easily beat missions with the aforementioned kind of zombies, but everywhere else his mediocre attack and movement speed make him very underwhelming, to the point he is entirely irrelevant past location 6.
- Ironically, there also exists an item set called "Firefighter", and it too suffers from overspecialization. All it does is increase the unit's fire damage by 30%. Flamethrower is the only one who can get a meaningful use out of it, and even then he has multiple better options. Firefighter's only benefit is that it's consistent.
- Crutch Character: Grenadier, albeit in the context of mid-game. A lot of mid-game missions involve waves of large, swift hordes of enemies, and his grenade throw is the best option you can have against these. But then come location 7, where swarms of enemies are too widespread, and Damagers as a whole become too expensive to be used efficiently.
- Combat Resuscitation: Paramedic Nancy is capable of reviving any dead units once, unless their corpse is too damaged to be revived. (Units that detonate on death or are burnt to ashes)
- Color-Coded Item Tiers: Items are separated into four tiers: Common (White), Rare (Blue), Epic (Purple) and Legendary (Orange). Higher tiered items can be upgraded further and can contain a higher amount of bonus stats.
- Critical Status Buff:
- Units equipped with the Surgery set gain doubled main damage once they reach half health or below. The effect is lost if the unit is healed above the health threshold.
- The Hitman item set also provides a buff to critical damage if a unit goes below 70% health. Just like Surgery, the effect is lost if their health goes past that threshold.
- Policeman Diaz's special ability gives a 30% speed increase to all actions if his health is at less than a half.
- Berserker's special ability gives him a 50% increase to critical chance while his health is not full.
- Degraded Boss: Paramedic is presented as the boss of the first location. He then gets downgraded to an Elite Mook during mid-game.
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- Downplayed with Red Barrel. People are generally aware that it's a strong item but are often scared off by its lower direct damage and higher cost in comparison to Blue Barrel. With enough game sense and good positioning, however, Red Barrel can be the most effective defensive tool thanks to its high health and its explosion, while shining on offense with its fire pools.
- Lester can come off as a reskin of Farmer – they both have identical stats and function the same, with the only difference being their factions and Lester's quicker firing and reload speed. In practice, this is exactly what makes him powerful in the right hands, as he can provide large bursts of damage more often, all while requiring less time and courage than Policeman and Ranger. Finally, his faction bonus synergizes with him very well, granting him a lot more powerful double shots. If you manage to compensate for Lester's fragility, he becomes one of the best units for use during the campaign.
- Psychos' 2/2 synergy allows them to generate small packs of Rage 25% of the time upon landing a crit. The awesome part is that this way you can start a non-stop spam of Berserker, Saw, cheap rage items, and even Bill's LMG, but actually enabling it can be challenging. Not only that you must use the 13-rage cost duo, who are tricky units on their own, but you must also ensure that your deck compensates for their issues while allowing you to get the most out of the resource they generate.
- Dump Stat: Charisma and Valor are this for almost every unit in the game. There's very few instances in which you would actually want to upgrade them, and they are mostly related to using members of Circus Pack outside of their default team synergies, and certain units' special abilities.
- Elite Mook: Blue enemies of location 7 count as this towards their green counterparts from early-to-mid game. Aside from having much higher stats, they can also do critical hits that stun units.
- Empty Levels: The bus and all units can be raised up to level 13. The player, however, can go as high as 19. Yet there are no unlocks past the 13th mark, and your only reward every time is 10 bucks and some fuel.
- Evil Counterpart: The Marauders are essentially enemy versions to your units.
- Naked to Redneck. Both have high speed and good damage, but are ultimately frail cannon fodder who are usually spammed throughout levels they appear in.
- Robber to Sheriff Charlotte. Both are backline revolver users who specialize in single shot damage.
- Lubber to Builder. Both are slower but stronger damager type units who have bullet resistance.
- Rifleman to Farmer. Both are double barrel shotgun users who are slow, but fire powerful blasts.
- Biker to Gunslinger. Both are units wielding automatic firing guns who spray their enemies with bullets.
- Crazy to both Redneck and Mechanic. He takes the speed from Mechanic's opening attack with Redneck's sustained damage with the shovel.
- The Truck Driver to Sheriff Bill. Considering the fight against him is essentially a Mirror Match. The driver mans an armored vehicle just like Bill's bus, sends out the Marauders to defend the truck like how you send out your units, and uses an LMG to shoot down at enemies just like Bill's LMG.
- Excuse Plot: Like the first game, Zombie Warfare doesn't have much of a story. You just destroy barricade after barricade to let your bus go through, killing zombies along the way, and eventually confronting a crashed alien walker, which might be the source of the infection.
- Downplayed ever since the introduction of cutscenes. They still don't tell us much, though.
- Expy: Lester, Turbo, Glenn, and Austin as blatant examples. Queen, Sonya, and Builder Abby as more subtle ones. More examples can be found on the Shout-Out page.
- Eyes Out of Sight: The game’s art style has every human character’s eyes hidden for the most part. Usually achieved through hats, helmets, masks, or eyewear. Carlos, the second dark-skinned Agent, and Robber are seen as exceptions to this pattern, not sporting any sort of headwear, but they still have their eyes hidden like everyone else anyways. In these cases, it's their hair casting a permanent shadow over them. By the time you can see their eyes though, they are most certainly dead, with whatever headwear they had on falling/breaking off only to reveal lifeless bloodshot or yellow eyes in many cases.
- That's also a visual indicator that Glenn still isn't dead when he gets knocked down, as he keeps his hat with his eyes covered, and when he dies for real, then his hat gets knocked off. Although, interestingly, there are a number of other units who also keep their eyes hidden upon death. But unlike Glenn, they obviously don’t come back alive.
- Interestingly, Clown Chopper, the Psychos skin for Chopper, does depict him with eyes. There are no other skins with this distinction, making it quite an exception. The only explanation being that Chopper wears face paint with this skin, which could take attention away from his eyes, but they're still clearly visible.
- Sometimes, units will just have shadows covering their eyes when nothing should be. Unit skins involving things like headbands, a beanie, a santa hat, or a backwards cap should have the unit's eyes exposed to light, but a shadow still keeps them hidden, despite there being nothing to produce the shadow.
- Fake Difficulty: Shown via RNG playing a big role in enemy functionality. It affects such aspects as the frequency of attacks, positioning in individual waves, and how often they pause while moving and trigger abilities.
- Forced Level-Grinding: Downplayed. Players can manage to beat the game with human units upgraded as low as level 8. Instead, the main grind is focused on leveling up upgrade items.
- Glass Cannon: All of your Fighters are this. Zombies can easily Zerg Rush you and even the most basic of undead mooks can take a couple of hits, but in exchange, your Fighter units can put out more damage than any zombie. Even units specifically made to hold enemies back can only handle one or two mauling them at a time, while any unit that isn't a Heavyweight will quickly fold once an enemy has the chance to whale on them.
- Guide Dang It!: The game contains a lot of mechanics that aren't explained in-game anywhere:
- How the Egg enemies work. They are immune to all bullets when they are inactive, and will "awake" once damaged by melee damage (either with a melee unit or dropping a barrel). While it's active, it loses its immunity and starts spawning Energy Spheres. Only the last part is ever explained on its Zombiepedia page;
- What agility does. It's used to determine how often a unit pauses while attacking and when targetting enemies, completely preventing that from happening when maxed out. Because this mechanic is chance based, it can be difficult to figure its usage out until you decide to fully upgrade some agility watch and give it to a melee unit;
- Item sets deserve a special mention because in-game descriptions fail to properly describe their real functionality. The most infamous example is the Hitman set. Its description states that it adds a flat +30% to its wearer's crit. damage stat, but in practice, it applies an additional x1.3 multiplier on top of the regular bonus.
- Hazmat Suit: The Scientist units except for Dr. Sanchez wear one. Their zombified counterparts, the Epidemiologist and the Slob also wear one. They come with the benefit of making most of them fireproof.
- Immune to Flinching: Various zombies and most heavyweights have knockback resistance.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: The Foreman zombie has a metal pipe stabbing through his sides.
- Item Caddy: Austin, who is the worst high-rate-of-fire unit in the game thanks to having bare-bones stats, unjustly high rage cost, and no survivability skills. The only reason people are willing to spend a whole 500 greens on him is because of his ability to generate coins on kill. When used in a proper mission, he is able to create more than 1000 gold in a single session.
- Knee Fold Fall of Defeat: Done by Rogue, Abby, and Juggernaut.
- Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game: A gender-netural example is present in a particularly infamous ad of the game. It features a massive grotesque zombie that looks like a cross between Demon and Cephalopods, and is able to summon and launch multiple Energy Spheres. It doesn't exist in the actual game.
- Funnily enough, the same ad also used to demonstrate that trope by featuring a revealing skin for Sniper Polina that's a Shout-Out to Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V. The skin wasn't present in the game at that time, but a slightly edited version of it had been added later, effectively making it a delayed subversion.
- Late Character Syndrome: Light Soldier, who is unlocked at level 13. By the time the player will achieve it, they will be close to fighting the final boss. It doesn't help that LS' design in general is bad for late-game locations and that he is outclassed by other Damager units like Turbo and Guard in Skirmish.
- Downplayed with Nancy and Rogue, who are unlocked at level 13 too, yet their unique traits are so strong that they justify these units' insane price tags.
- Long-Range Fighter: Shooters and Snipers are this by default. Most Shotgunners are downplayed examples, due to their much shorter base range.
- Zig-Zagged with Abby. She wields a heavy machinegun, but only ever fires it once, and then proceeds to attack enemies upfront... despite her mediocre health and attack speed.
- Mad Bomber: Queen, a psycho with a grenade launcher.
- Magikarp Power:
- Glenn is quite a mediocre unit on his own. He's essentially a spam unit who costs 10 more Courage than the actual spam units, and even though he has higher stats than Redneck, Mechanic, and Rodriguez, that still isn't enough to save him. However, to compensate for him normally not being part of any team powers, he was given 3 skins. One for Military, one for Police, and one for Northerners. And he can synergize pretty well with each of them, giving him a resurgence in use. Glenn and Lester (with special ability unlocked) activating Northerners 2/2 allows the two of them to blast through hordes. Glenn can try to activate Military 3/3 twice, or even 3 times, meaning he has multiple chances of spawning a free SpecOps. And he can activate the powerful Police 5/5 that gives every other police member on the battlefield the Fury buff (permanent 100% damage increase) when a police member dies, multiple times by himself.
- Special abilities unlocked at level 13 tend to be this for some units.
- Pepper is a very weak unit; doesn’t excel at much besides rolling back to keep herself alive, and she isn’t used really past the early game. However, her special level 13 ability has her give the powerful inspiration buff to all other allies when sent out, essentially making her an accessible version of Cap. As Cap is locked behind a 925 money pack, is tied for having the second highest Courage cost in the game at 35, and having worse survivability skills than Pepper, she pretty much becomes his direct upgrade, barring the fact that she can’t use her ability more than once per life and lacking some resistances.
- Swat's special allows him to get a massive 25-damage bonus for every 90 points of charisma he has. While charisma is a negligible stat on average, the buffs of it are surprisingly generous, meaning that it's easier to upgrade Swat's damage by seeking charisma out, with the approach also being more rewarding to him and his team.
- The Agents' special makes it so they properly count as two separate units, meaning that if you use them, you need one less unit to activate Police team synergies. This allows the Agents to always have the 2/2 Police power active by themselves for both them and the entire team, which makes Agents much stronger in general, and lets any Police team have one extra slot open for any other unit or Rage item.
- Male Gaze: When any female unit dies a highlight is made on their thighs and bottom. Only Charlotte ends up lying on her back, but it doesn't stop her from evoking the trope in a different way.
- Abby and Nancy are the only exceptions. The former falls on the floor face down, and the latter turns into a zombie instantly.
- Master of All: In the modern state of the game's balance, Sonya is perhaps the only unit that is truly capable of fulfilling all necessary niches at once. She has an acceptable courage price, a right level of tankiness to her, an ability to meaningfully defend herself in close quarters, high potential damage, and an ability to both burst single targets down, and provide crowd control, all while being swift enough to respond to critical situations quickly.
- Master of None: Builder. He is the most basic Damager out of all while lacking any traits that could make him stand out. When compared to his alternatives, he lacks in either health or attack/movement speed. For comparison, Grenadier has his grenade, Turbo has her extreme movement speed and full bullet resistance, and Guard and Light Soldier simply have higher base stats.
- Mighty Glacier: Some heavyweights manage to live up to their intended role, working as examples of this trope. Policeman, Chopper, and Juggernaut are all pretty slow units with a solid amount of HP, who can deal massive damage with their weapons and signature moves.
- Militaries Are Useless: Somehow, a bunch of random people has done a better job at fighting zombies and aliens than the whole US military.
- Subverted with some of the survivors. Sonya, Specops, and Grenadier are all useful units that belong to different military branches and organizations.
- Double subverted with Internal Forces' and Military's synergy decks. They are largely inefficient, and their team powers aren't helping the case.
- Subverted with some of the survivors. Sonya, Specops, and Grenadier are all useful units that belong to different military branches and organizations.
- Monster Compendium: The Zombiepedia records any enemies the player have encountered, listing their stats alongside a short description. (Some of which are misleading or outdated.)
- Mana Meter: Courage builds up over time, and most units require spending Courage to be spawned in.
- Morale Mechanic: If there are too many zombies on the field, your units (and the Marauder enemies) may be inflicted with the "Fear" status effect. Fear causes units to have slower reaction times and pauses in combat more often.
- Money for Nothing: Zig-Zagged, with manifestations of zigs and zags constantly changing throughout the game's history:
- Matter of fact, the trope was zig-zagging from the start. Prior to update 2.9.2, the level cap for everything was higher, meanwhile efficient methods of coin farming required specific units to be at least level 10. Underprepared players didn't have a choice but to grind missions with highest coin rewards... Yet once they could get their hands on all the crucial upgrades the proccess of money making was becoming mindnumbingly easy, boiling down to either fighter spamming in Wall Mart, or bulletproof rangers stacking in Corn Farm. These events were able to provide players with enough coins to buy all units in a few weeks, and more than enough items for selling in the future. Unfortunately, the limitations on event attempts and shopkeeper's bank made those methods unable to catch up with unit upgrades – the prices were scaling too high past level 13, and it could easily take a month to raise a single unit past the 16 mark. Meanwhile, maxing out someone could take a year since reaching level 19 in the first place requires at least two, and there was no way to speed the grind up due to lack of quests. In the end, even though post-game players always had something to save up their money for, 99% of the time their savings were turning forever dormant, as grinding for levels used to be that tedious.
- Right after unit levels got capped at 13, the trope took full effect for veteran players, as even those who haven't upgraded their units much still received a big enough compensation to buy all newly introduced specials, and max out units they haven't touched before, with some spare change left for the future. Meanwhile, players who haven't progressed far into the game have received nothing and got forced to deal with new bus prices, which became unreasonably high.
- The aftermath of update 3.6.0 had an effect similar to the previous example, but it ultimately resulted in the trope becoming averted. This is thanks to the new item system, which turned out to be a perfect coin sink: many veteran players didn't even notice how their virtual wallets got empty after constant grinding in supply runs.
- Min-Maxing: The game operates on the inversion of min-maxing. If you focus too much on a single stat the upgraded unit will almost always fail in battle, as none of characteristics are able to properly compensate for one another. The main issue that stops this trope from being fully averted is the fact that there exist multiple universal dump stats. Critical chance and damage lead to outright zig-zagging, as viability of crit. builds vastly varies from unit to unit.
- Noob Bridge: End-game locations introduce multiple examples of this, thanks to early-to-mid game over-relying on spam or being very generous with how you can approach mission completion:
- Ranged unit stacking is a strategy that is viable from the very beginning of the game. But if a player will fail to notice this, they'll have a very hard time beating mission 119 which plainly has no other solutions.
- Not many players consider using either of the barrels or Generator as a wall against Charged Zombies. This is a very important tactic for multiple missions where the only enemies are CZs and multiple Eggs.
- Because most common and dangerous enemies of location 7 are all fire-resistant, players tend to assume that this is also true for the 8th world. As a result, they don't try using Red Barrel or Flamethrower against Twins, who are almost unbeatable otherwise. Fortunately, however, it is still technically beatable without using fire, and proper use of it still trivializes the only stage they appear in.
- While missions with poisonous and explosive enemies can be beaten by using non-specialized units, doing so can be very challenging. However, most new players still go with that idea, simply because they don't know about Firefighter's resistances.
- Not Completely Useless: Medic is often considered a highly inefficient unit, usually being outclassed by simply bringing Medkit into your deck. However, she shines during the Halloween and Christmas event, since keeping specific units alive is much more important, and Medkits are limited in these events. All this makes Medic a mainstay in teams during annual competitions.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder:
- Welder is the only example of this among units: his starting health is 8. Even at level 13, with a fully upgraded set of items, it can prove difficult to bring him above 100 health. At this point in the game, most enemies can kill him in one hit, true to his title;
- Fat and Charged Zombies are designed like this on purpose, as players are meant to destroy them with droppable items. Since some of them have low base damage, they can still be used against the aforementioned zombies.
- One Stat to Rule Them All: For a brief period of time, cost reduction was an example of this trope as it allowed units to achieve a discount as low as -20. While it was extremely difficult to actually acquire four items with a -5 reduction, getting your hands on them was equal to beating the game. Skirmish outright suffered from this stat, as it was possible to make decks with 16 units in them, which were all effectively unbeatable. Cost reduction's dominance was eventually stopped with the introduction of a cap for it: the buff can now only be upgraded once, for a total of -2 reduction on a single item.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Dead Ahead zombies mostly follow the usual formula of being stupid sacks of rot, with occasional bodily mutations. However, some enemies also got under the effect of mysterious alien energy. So far, this energy has given the zombies: telekinesis, necromancy, rapid regeneration, and the ability to turn into lightning-fast suicide bombers. Aliens Are Bastards, indeed.
- Overrated and Underleveled: Light Soldier's description hones his very high base damage, but it also ignores his high courage cost and lack of any outstanding perks.
- Overshadowed by Awesome:
- Even though Jailer is a perfectly viable unit that is also crucial for his team, there's no reason to keep using him after you unlock Rogue. Aside from team differences, he does the exact same things as Jailer, and more effectively at that, thanks to ridiculously high damage and faster attack animations.
- To add salt to the wound of Builder being such a "nothing" unit, Grenadier has the exact same base stats as him, with the exact same resistances, much faster attack speed, and a powerful ability on top. Even Guard and Light Soldier outclass him, who both fulfill his same role, and have significantly higher stats.
- Carlos is a good, formidable force himself, putting out high amounts of sustained damage from a distance. However, he often gets overshadowed by Sonya because of her higher health and better CQC abilities. Even though Carlos actually beats her out in having more sustained firepower, he's still a vulnerable unit and is rarely able to handle even lone enemies, should they get close to him. On the other hand, Sonya's punches do respectable damage, and she is able to land critical hit spin kicks, which knock enemies away from her, allowing to finish them off with her SMG. When the late game comes and the player starts meeting Insectoids, this matters a lot more, as those enemies deliberately target ranged units.
- There are multiple item sets that blatantly outshine all other options. For melee units, this is the case with Gentleman, which provides a temporary x1.5 damage multiplier once they start their critical hit animations. For ranged units, the most broken option is Hunter, which provides a high boost to bullet damage based on distance traveled. There's simply no reason to use any of the other sets for the majority of units.
- Powerful, but Inaccurate: Thanks to his level 13 ability, Swat counts as a shooter with the highest potential single hit damage in the entire game. With proper min-maxing, it can make him deal damage higher than 150. The problem is that he pays for all this with low accuracy, made worse by his long attack initiation range.
- PVP Balanced: The game has a major problem with this, since PvP modes and regular missions play radically different from each other. It's common for a unit that is poweful in skirmish to be subpar in PvE, and the inverse is even more frequent. Same can be said about team powers, but their balancing is even more polarizing, as each of them is deliberately designed to be useful in only one of the two modes. Developers rarely ever do anything about this, and when they try the results end up usetting both types of players.
- Reviving Enemy: Undeads and Surgeants are capable of coming back to life after death, with the Undead able to do this 5 times. Burning them with fire will prevent their resurrection.
- Raising the Steaks: Pooches are skeletonized dogs that sprint past your defenses, but are very fragile. They are the only undead animals that appear in the game.
- Scenery Porn: Most missions in each stage use similar-looking backgrounds. However, there are some levels with fully unique scenery, and those tend to be an eye candy. Each supply run also comes with its own set of backgrounds, and some of those make the game feel really atmospheric.
- Screen Crunch: Visibility of the area depends on your phone's display. Because of how the game handles its pixel scaling, the battlefield will look heavily zoomed in on some models, and players will need to swipe left to see incoming enemies. This hinders certain tactics and makes it harder to time your attacks against hordes of runners.
- Series Mascot: Free Hugs, even though this status is to a lesser extent that her definitive mascot status in the original Dead Ahead, due to her being a rare Piñata Enemy in this game. And others like Redneck, Pepper, the TMF, the IF, and even the Runner zombie getting just as much attention and being just as Iconic.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Pellets of shotgunners can travel only for a fixed distance before disappearing. The units themselves also tend to have short base range.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: This trope used to be in full effect, thanks to most shotgunners dealing greater bursts of damage than shooters, and having faster preparation time too. However, the trope became averted by introduction of a cap on shotgunners' bullet travel distance. Nowadays, the two classes perform roughly on par with each other.
- Simple, yet Awesome:
- Mechanic is a standard Fighter who uses his strongest attack first. Coming out of the bus with his sledgehammer, he'll slam it into the first enemy he encounters and deal 3 times his normal damage before switching to his wrench. This opening attack is effective enough to deal with some powerful threats in one hit, or at least take out a massive chunk of their health. It gets better with his special ability, which lets Mechanic keep the sledgehammer if he gets a kill with it, allowing him to chain kill after kill with high damage.
- Cashier is also a standard fighter, but he has a relatively slow crit animation, and doesn't have any special perks to his name. He does have unusually high stats for what kind of unit he is. Which at least makes him powerful. However, his special ability is when he truly shines, granting his critical hits quadruple damage. A 4x in damage on crits makes Cashier a powerhouse who can deal with some of the most dangerous or tanky threats in the game all by himself, if he gets to hit them.
- The Agents are normally Awesome, yet Impractical, but when given their special ability and put in with the right team, they can become great support units. The Agents' special ability allows the duo to properly count as 2 units for team powers. while it might sound like another trivially unimpactful special ability, consider that the Police are one of the best teams, with arguably the best team powers in the game. Police 2/2 is always active for the entire team when the Agents are on the team, Police 3/3 is easier to get 3 police alive for due to them being two units for the price of one. And overall, 3/3 and 5/5 Police teams get one extra slot open for any other more versatile unit or Rage item to fill, making those teams overall less restrictive.
- Some team powers count as this.
- Marines 2/2 is the only team power that only affects one unit: Private Rodriguez. Making it so that Rodriguez never pauses between attacks. Rodriguez was nerfed to have a major problem with pausing, even when he's at max agility, he'll often stop and stand still when attacking. This brings him back to his pre-nerf glory, being able to punch and kick through hordes swiftly. While it doesn't help his greater team directly, a significantly powered-up Rodriguez greatly makes up for it.
- Northerners 2/2 makes every Northerner score a critical hit as their next attack after getting a kill. Even though this only synergizes with Lester with his special ability unlocked and Glenn, it synergizes with them extremely well. Allowing Glenn to shred hordes of weaker enemies apart and allowing Lester to keep on using his special ability's extra powerful dual barrel shot since it counts as a critical hit.
- Stone Wall:
- Policeman with his unique 50% melee resistance and high base health.
- Juggernaut achieves this status through his shield, which is equal to 30% of his health. It's possible to reach over 1000 effective HP with him thanks to that perk.
- Suicide Attack: Charged Zombie's only tactic, as it can't attack normally. Once it charges itself to the max, it starts rushing towards the nearest unit at incredibly high speed.
- Nancy, Welder, and Firefighter get repurposed for this strategy in Skirmish, as their usual traits don't play that big of a role in it.
- Suicide Mission: Every mission counts as this for your close-range units, as it's very unlikely for any of them to stay in battle for a long time. Not like that's a problem, not for Bill or yourself at least...
- Take Your Time: The phases of the final boss are triggered by reaching certain thresholds of its health. There's no other limits during the first and the second of them, and the boss only starts attacking in the latter. This means that you can do practically whatever you want throughout the first phase, as long as you don't deal too much damage to the boss or let the bus take too much damage.
- Third Eye: One of Crank's more peculiar mutations is the addition of an extra eye located on the side of his mouth. Compared to Crank's other mutant features, this one seems fairly random and serves no other purpose than to add that extra creepiness factor to an already abominable zombie.
- Time-Limit Boss: The third phase of the final boss battle must be completed in under a minute.
- Unique Enemy: For a long time, Foreman and Twins could only be found in a single level each (missions 25 and 138, respectively). The trope became averted with the introduction of revamped Halloween Event, some waves of which feature the aforementioned zombies. They also were added to some of the supply runs introduced in update 3.6.0.
- Useless Useful Spell: Nitrogen, an AoE rage item used to stun enemies. It takes a minute to prepare, is often a worse option than Molotov Cocktail/explosives, and stun in general is only useful if it's consistently applied on a single target. Not to mention that it can affect the player's units as well.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Displayed with Flamethrower's eponymous weapon. It's short ranged and the spray itself is somewhat slow. It can theoretically provide very high damage output, but that requires extreme min-maxing to achieve, due to Flamer's low base stats.
- White Mage: Nancy, whose combat abilities are limited to a slow medic bag swing. Instead, she has a unique AI that prioritizes using her healing – she'll rush out of combat if there's a unit to revive with her defibrillators or patch up with her injections.
- Xenomorph Xerox: Insectoid. All that's missing is a tail and a second mouth.
- Zerg Rush: A common tactic for zombies. The majority of missions between location 4 and 6 rely on spamming hordes of fragile enemies who possess a dangerous ability.
- The Redneck team enables this strategy by giving players a chance to get free courage in case any member of the synergy gets hurt. Since Redneck (the unit) is a Fighter, spamming him will likely result in even more spam.
- Same goes for the Psychos team, which has a chance to create a pack of rage points upon landing critical hits. This allows Saw and Berserker, the main crit powerhouses, to quickly refund their own prices, and then create more resources to send out their clones.
- The Redneck team enables this strategy by giving players a chance to get free courage in case any member of the synergy gets hurt. Since Redneck (the unit) is a Fighter, spamming him will likely result in even more spam.
- Zombie Apocalypse: As demonstrated.
- Zombie Infectee: Almost all of the Marauders are said to be infected, except for Biker, although it's implied with him. Even though the rules of this world's zombie infection are unclear, and they seem to be fine with being like this, they're still infected.
- Naked has fully green hands and a whole green face.
- Lubber has green hands and blood pouring out of his mouth.
- Rifleman has a small amount of blood coming from under his cap.
- Crazy is said to have almost transformed into a zombie, and immediately turns upon death without even falling to the ground.
- Robber and Biker both appear to be perfectly fine, but Robber is said to be infected, and Biker is implied, being with all the other Marauders.
