YMMV / Dead Ahead Zombie Warfare

• Awesome Art: The unique art style of Dead Ahead is often considered the main reason behind its success. Even a lot of those who don't like the game acknowledge how great and appealing the game's visuals are. The way it tastefully combines cute, stylized anatomy with edgy militarism and body horror has attracted attention of all sorts of people to the game. It even inspired plenty of fans to become pixel artists themselves, thanks to the art style of their favorite game being relatively easy to copy.
• Best Known for the Fanservice:
  • For what it's worth, Charlotte is a solid sniper unit who can help her teammates by dealing large amounts of damage from a distance. However, the real reason most people decide to try her out is to see her huge breasts shake while she is firing. Fortunately, most of them grow to appreciate Charlotte's actual combat skills too.
  • Try asking Zombie Warfare players what they remember the Witch for. One half would complain about her being a huge pain in the ass. Another will mention her unintentionally suggestive outfit, especially the wide cleavage of her shirt.
• Breather Level: Each world has at least a few easy/medium missions located right next to multiple hard/nightmarish ones. Stage 8 is the only exception where every stage is a literal nightmare.
• Character Tiers:
  • The game's wiki provides community-made rankings for units in PvE setting. Best options for main game are usually extremely versatile, or have a unique attribute that allows them to outshine all other similar units. Modern PvP is considered to be too polarising and chaotic to provide any meaningful rating for non-meta units. It doesn't helps that team powers play a major role in the mode too.
  • Speaking of team powers, the wiki provides a rating for them too, but once again for PvE only. However, this is more justified, as there's only around 7 synergies that actually have an effect on skirmish games.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Long-time players tend to add Red Barrel to any deck they use, even if a mission they about to play has fire-resistant enemies. This is thanks to RB being a Jack of All Stats support item, while also providing an easy way to get rid of corpses, and block more than one Charged Zombies at once.
• Critical Backlash: Back when updates 3.6.0 and 3.6.1 were only available as random-invite betas, there wasn't much info shared on how exactly the new item system worked. There were, however, many stories of how new upgrade items allow units to have extreme stats, and how overpowered some of the set bonuses are. This caused a small portion of the fandom to preemptively bash on the overhaul, assuming it strips the game off the tower defense elements in favor of mindless gacha grinding for raw power. However, once every player got access to the new system, and people had enough time to properly analyze all changes made to the game, the aforementioned vocal minority changed their attitude entirely, seeing the new system as an interesting way to diversify gameplay of overwise stale units, and make certain underdogs much stronger than before.
• Demonic Spiders: Almost any enemy that runs fast, can soak up damage and dish out just as much can be qualified as this. Unfortunately for us, that means more than half of the zombies that the game will throw at you.
  • Every single "runner" enemy counts as this, as they are designed to pressure the player into sending out units. Most of them can be dealt with easily, though. But unfortunately, there're still some especially notorious examples:
    • Witches live up to their original inspiration by making the players groan every time one of them enters the scene. Although they go down in one or two hits, they are extraordinarily fast and have high DPS. Not to mention, the moment they spot a Unit, they scream and charge at the bus with triple the usual speed.
    • Pooches. They usually come in groups, can reach your bus in a blink of an eye, and sprint around in a zigzag pattern so your Units will have trouble targeting them. Luckily, they only appear in Location 2 (and certain Location 1 challenges), being irrelevant everywhere else.
    • Charged Zombies start out slow, but upon picking a target, they charge up, and zip forward at lightning speeds, colliding with the first humans they encounter and usually killing them with high damage. Charged zombies are almost unstoppable without a rage item like a barrel to block their path or kill them directly. Even though shotgun users and High Rate of Fire Shooters can usually pick them off with pellet spread or a stray bullet, the horde in front of them might be enough to protect them while charging up. And when they start charging from off screen, you'll never be able to deal with them reactively.
  • Insectoids are very fast enemies that can pounce in the air, completely out of range, to reach and damage humans. Seems manageable enough, until you realize they only target ranged units with this attack, and possess DPS rivaled by nobody but the Prisoners, which means that melee fighters will have hard time dealing with them too, unless you're Policeman Diaz.
  • Speaking of Prisoners, these guys are Jack of All Stats – they are quick, have moderately high HP, and very high base damage for an "ordinary" zombie. To top it off, they turn into a Small Insectoid upon death – another annoying, fireproof pest.
  • Cranks. They have an astronomical amount of health, are deceptively quick despite their sheer bulk, and can easily gut even your most durable units in about two to three strikes, being also immune to knockback. There's no real way to counter these guys other than concentrated fire, with support from Red Barrels if it's really needed.
  • The Big Blues – extremely slow enemies with a hefty amount of HP. On their own, these guys aren't actually a big problem. But then you find out that they can regenerate health, and stun your units just like their smaller contemporaries. To top it off, they usually come in swarms of three to four. For an enemy designed to be a Beef Gate rather than an actual threat, these things are too good at their job. Make sure to bring at least two ranged units if you are gonna attempt a mission that has Big Blues in it.
  • The Twins. Despite her being slow as molasses, she can easily back it up by being constantly on the move and possessing a double attack, with each hit doing extremely high damage. Practically no unit in the game can take it more than once, save for maxed out heavyweights. But the real worst part is that she has a whopping 95% bullet resistance on top of a high HP pool, basically rendering your long-ranged units (who will be your main damagers at that point) completely useless. There are reliable ways to defeat her, but they are slightly unorthodox for end-game meta, and will still require considerable effort if a player can't afford to properly level up items required for them.
  • Slobs – bloated epidemiologists dressed in hazmat suits that make them fireproof. Another meat shield, this one is infamous for its on-death explosion that fatally poisons any units nearby, which makes it difficult to keep them away from ranged units by spamming fighters. They, however, are still the least threatening among all infamous enemies, as some poison immune units perform decently well against them.
• Cult Classic: The game isn't exactly the most well-known, especially when compared to the standards of other popular mobile games. However, the community and fanbase that surrounds Zombie Warfare is very dedicated to it.
• Difficulty Spike: Depending on players' knowledge of the game, their first spike might happen as late as the beginning of Stage 6. In the worst case, every new world serves as one.
• Epileptic Trees: Bill's bus is somehow able to contain well over a hundred passangers in it, on top of said passengers being identical copies of characters that are implied to be unique individuals. The community's explanation? It's a cloning machine.
• Fanon:
  • Sort of, since it used to be official – the units used to have backstories. Sadly, they were deleted (sans Marine and Rodriguez's) and retconned in order to avoid copyright problems, since all of them were Whole Plot References. Despite that, details from said stories have been remembered, and are still unamonously accepted by the community years later.
    • The most popular one is Redneck and Private Rodriguez being brothers. Since they both fulfill the same role (cheap spammable Meat Shields or Glass Cannons) they’re often remembered as brothers, and it’s not uncommon to see them together in fan works. And since Rodriguez is a navy-man and Redneck’s direct upgrade in-game, he’s often depicted as the older brother, if they’re not depicted as twins first.
    • Redneck’s name is Russell in his backstory.
    • Sheriff Charlotte is Sniper Polina's aunt. This detail is less remembered than the brothers, but the sniper duo are still considered aunt and niece by anyone who knows that detail.
  • Also sort of, due to official art also featuring this. Whenever promotional art for the game would show the units having eyes, Depending on the Artist, it's more often than not portrayed them as having black irises with blue sclera. The fans totally ran with this stylization idea, as it's common to see the units or other humans portrayed with blue sclera eyes in fanart.
  • In the very first mission of the game, Bill calls out to someone named Joe. It's often theorized that "Joe" is the Mechanic. Since Mechanic is one of the first units you unlock, and the first mission takes place at a repair shop named "Joe's Repairs", the Mechanic's name is often presumed to be Joe.
  • Often in more light-hearted fan work, if the cast is acting eccentric and silly, then expect Cap to be the Only Sane Man who questions the antics and happen around him.
  • Due to a single pixel that is placed between Robber’s mouth and facial hair, he’s often mistaken for constantly smiling in battle. It turns out that this pixel is just part of his beard. However, that revelation hasn’t stopped people from still portraying the Robber as a Smug Smiler with a cocky attitude.
  • People like to believe that Rogue's armor and mask broke after he left the TMF, which can explain why he doesn't have natural bullet and poison resistances like the other TMF members.
• Fetish Retardant: One of the most popular examples of Fanservice in the game are death animations of nearly all female units, in which they fall to their side, and get to display their... unexpectedly voluptuous bottoms. Unfortunately, the "death" part made some players find the sexualized sprites to be in bad taste. The rest don't seem to care as much, though, sometimes for extreme reasons.
• Franchise Original Sin: Modern day Zombie Warfare is often criticized by the series' fans for being extremely grindy, with each major update providing new methods of enforcing that. The situation only gets worse when you realize that the game is riddled with bad investment opportunities. It's uncommon to hear people blaming all this on Mobirate being trend chasers, but they tend to forget that the original Dead Ahead was also full of extreme grind for coins, and most of its arsenal is really subpar, at least in comparison to a few overly efficient weapons.
• Game-Breaker: When it was first introduced, Rogue's special ability had the possibility of granting him 100% bullet resistance. This, combined with his immunity to explosions (courtesy of being a TMF unit) and all-around high stats, meant players quickly abused him to get thousands of levels in the otherwise difficult Corn Farm event with little effort, since his resistances made him immune to every problematic form of damage present in Corn Farm. Naturally, the synergy got reworked to ensure that the immunity only caps at 90%. The patch happened just a day after Corn Farm came back into the event rotation.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: DA:ZW's russian fandom isn't exactly small, but it pales in comparison to the game's popularity in Latin America and some asian countries, most notably China and Vietnam.
• Good Bad Bugs: Throughout the game's history there existed multiple bugs that gave units unintended advantages.
  • Desperado skin used to come with a bug that caused it to skip 75% of Diaz's reload animation, only inserting one shell yet being able to fire all four shots.
  • Due to an error, Gambling set's bonus wasn't granting its wearer +25% to crit. chance, but instead +125%. This was causing every attack they land to be critical. In truth, this wasn't worth using on majority of units since their criticals simply weren't that special (or were too slow, and as a result – counterproductive), but the few who could benefit from it were effectively becoming game-breakers. Rogue is one of the better examples: Gambling set's effect was essentially turning him into a true stunlocker.
  • Update 3.6.0 introduced crticial hits to ranged units, and those came with a pleasant bug: such shots didn't consume ammo from magazines. Even though it's a nice bonus, critical builds weren't a realiable enough option for ranged units... up until introduction of the Gambling set discussed above. The combination of these two bugs allowed players to abuse ranged units in skirmish, causing them to fire their guns infinitely. Abby was the most popular pick for this combo, for obvious reasons.
  • There existed an error that caused some units' special abilities to apply twice on their owners. Some notable examples include Sniper Polina's armor penetration going from 40% to 80%, and Swat's charisma bonuses granting 50 damage instead of 25.
• High-Tier Scrappy: While singleplayer top-tiers are generally adored, same can't be said about Skirmish. You are bound to attract hate to yourself for using just about anything that is overpowered in this mode, and that can include various things:
  • Among units, the most despised are Abby and Sniper, since they are both long-distance fighters with access to very high damage. Abby can mow through entire teams with her machine gun if you grant her Tactical set (multiplicatively ignores 50% enemy bullet resist which is otherwise the bane of ranged units), and Sniper is overly efficient with her backline support, often being the last unit standing yet entirely capable to finish off remaining opponents.
  • Certain team synergies are also infuriating:
    • 3/3 Builders is rarely fun to fight against, considering that most of the team is bullet resistant, has Abby in it, and the synergy itself allows to spawn one copy of either of the aforementioned units for free, providing power in numbers.
    • TMF has two tier that are equally despised. 2/2 provides resistance against explosives, effectively countering Juggernaut and Grenadier, two very common Skirmish units who are a bit annoying on their own but can be defeated with clever team positioning. Making them completely useless is the main reason why 2/2 TMF makes people groan, not to mention that it can be enabled for cheap with Rogue and Swat. As for 3/3, it's hated for the same reason as 3/3 Builders, since it functions identically.
    • While Military's 3/3 and 5/5 are rather tame, with the former being inconsistent, and the latter tied to cost reduction items, once they come into effect they easily ruin any fun for the team's opponent. 3/3 provides a chance to spawn a Specops upon a military's death, to provide strength in numbers at a random chance. And the dreaded 5/5 makes it so any individual militia won't be attacked by its opponents until they start attacking themselves, essentially meaning that the Military team will always get the first hit, providing a massive starting advantage. Since most of Military units are viable for Skirmish on their own, and the others still contribute to the team well, fighting their team requires extra effort unless you also use a similar formation.
  • Although the statement about singleplayer top tiers is overall accurate, you are unlikely to find any massive fans of Turret. Veteran players rarely use it in their playthroughs because of how cheap it is at higher levels, stripping even the most difficult missions of any challenge, meanwhile newbies tend to get confused by how it works, dislike that it takes a while to get the hang off, and are scared off by its high price.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A considerable portion of Dead Ahead's audience can be attributed to its unique pixel art style, without which it would've probably never catched on. There's a good chance you will meet someone who only bothered to complete the series just to see all sprites and backgrounds while actively hating both games' gameplay aspects.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • There's plenty of outright bad units in the game, but most of them still have their fans or just stay ignored. Same can't be said about Gunslinger, who is the second worst high-rate-of-fire unit in the game due to his lack of close quarters protection, unjustly slow speed, and poor damage output. His final nail in the coffin, though, is that he doesn't even have any weird fun gimmicks or cool strategies to mess around with, or anything that could let him fill a niche, which could've at least made him fun or interesting to use with the right teams. This makes him a very bland shooter with no reason to be used over Carlos and Sonya. You'll have hard time finding anyone who has at least some appreciation for him.
  • Jailer, who is actually a solid unit in his own right, earned his status of a "letdown" after the release of Rogue, which is the biggest example of a Power Creep in the game's history. Not only does Rogue have much better stats and the same perks, he can also be obtained with in-game currency instead of being locked behind a paywall. And although Jailer's team has better PvE synergies, they fail to favor the comparison in his side due to Jailers' powers being held back by their poor unit rotation, meanwhile TMF as a whole are strong in PvP, and Rogue doesn't needs them to be overpowered everywhere else. These unfortunate facts led to Jailer being seen as nothing but a waste of money.
  • Although College team powers can be useful nowadays, their original version were infamous for being one of the worst synergies in the entire game. They were all centered around disabling the mechanic of dead units turning into zombies, which is rarely ever a real threat. The situation doesn't gets better when you realize that none of College members have dangerous on-death transformations themselves, and that all of the team's skins are premium.
  • The current butt-of-all-jokes team synergy is Builders' 5/5, which grants its members a double increase to damage against barricades. This already sounds like a negligible upside, but it gets worse with the fact that Builders have a bad unit rotation with only 2.5 of them being able to even target the barricade. Funnily enough, the "0.5" unit, Abby, is the only one who can put this power to proper use, and not even with her axe but rather her minigun – using Abby with 5/5 Builders in Supply Runs allows to destroy the supply cache in around 2 seconds, the fastest in the game... but good luck actually reaching it, since the aforementioned rotation of Builders is not optimised for Supply Run game mode. The fact that this power has exactly one reasonable use case which still gets outclassed by safer options is what has earned it so much infamy.
• Moe: The game's fandom reinterpreted Pepper as this, thanks to her design that comes off as cute for many. Same happened to Free Hugs, but this one might've been an intended reaction, considering that she is one of the series' mascots.
• Nintendo Hard: The entire game is this when compared to the first. Dead Ahead is a simple side-scroller that only concerns you with having to tread as far as possible without crashing, while racking up combo chains. Zombie Warfare, however, is a much slower and more methodical game that requires you to rely on trial-and-error for deck building, and plan your moves several steps ahead, with correct timing playing a huge role.
• Recurring Fanon Character: Lilly, who is basically what became of the sexualized genderbent Willy mentioned under Self-Fanservice below. While she's not very popular these days, (unlike years ago) she still occasionally pops up in fan work every once in a while. Never to be forgotten.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Although update 3.6.2 has done more harm than good, it's hard to ignore that some units have only benefitted from its reworks:
    • Because of how leveling formula affects damage, Polina has went from one of the worst to one of the best units for use during majority of missions, since her damage ramps up that much. If you give her preparation time decreasing watches and a good item set, she becomes one of the best single-target eliminators, easily taking care of any dangerous zombie.
    • Now that upgrades affect all forms of damage, Abby can have her minigun upgraded, which means she can go from base 40 to as high as 130 damage for each of her bullets. This transformed her from a mediocre burst damager into a living definition of overkill.
  • Update 3.6.3 has done this to Emergency and College teams, which used to have infamously useless synergies. Although, it must be pointed out that the latter got a shorter end of the stick, because the new powers, while definitely strong in their own right, don't compensate for the issues of College's current unit rotation. Meanwhile, Emergency always had a tolerable selection of fighters, with improved buffs making it only stronger. Still, it's better than what both of these teams had before.
• Self-Fanservice:
  • Female characters who aren't explicity sexualised in the game tend to receive this treatment by the fandom, with Pepper being the most prominent example. Abby is the closest to an exception as most ZW fan-artists just don't seem to be into muscular women, but even she gets her share of "loving" drawings once in a blue moon.
  • Of all characters, Willy. What started as a Rule 63 joke of a raunchy variety has spiraled into a trend that took a while to die down, and even stuck to some people.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Once you've beaten the game and maxed out all meta units, there's not much left to do aside from investing into the entire roster, or replaying missions in creative ways. People found plenty of ways to do the latter:
  • The go-to way to spice your experience up is to play without buffs and team synergies. It's also a good way to learn advanced tricks, since you can no longer crutch on double increase to damage and faster preparation time.
  • Among level-specific challenges, the classic one is to beat mission 138 with only bullet-firing units. The catch is that this mission consists of nothing but non-stop waves of Twins, durable enemies with 95% resistance to bullet damage, occasionally supported by the Insectoid that rips ranged units to shreds. No melee rushdown, no fire, no armor penetration – just a lead storm.
  • Beating Cephalopods in creative ways is also a challenge of its own. This usually refers to tactics that aren't reliant on spamming fighters at the right time. One legendary example is using Polina with a Patriot item set, and farming deaths of her teammates until she can deal well over 30,000 damage, and essentially one-shot the boss.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Dead Ahead was far from a cakewalk, but it was something that anyone can pick up and play. This is not the case for Zombie Warfare. Aside from the complete Genre Shift into a strategy tower defense, enemies are now much more varied and unpredictable than the first game's, with many, if not all of them, being fully capable of becoming a giant pain in the ass to deal with, given the chance. There are more complex mechanics to juggle along this, too, like the Courage and Rage points, Unit cooldowns and that you have to finish a mission within a certain amount of time, lest your bus gets overrun with a massive horde, forcing you to restart the level.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Every time Mobirate introduces a new mechanic for units, few people take to it lightly. And while they tend to have valid complaints, such as said mechanics being overpowered or requiring too much grind to acquire, they are also prone to preemptively considering the game ruined because of them. This happened with level-13 specials, team powers, and then with the overhaul of item and unit upgrade systems.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Mobirate has a history of borrowing elements from popular-at-the-time games and implementing them in DA:ZW. Whenever fans notice this, they are quick to invoke the trope, although the outrage goes down just as fast, and everyone stops caring.
  • The only time the negative attitude has stuck around is when players noticed that ZW's item system overhaul is essentially a watered down version of Genshin Impact's artifacts. This is thanks to veteran players being baffled by Mobirate's continuing lack of originality, and the game's primary audience of teens having a polarizing attitude towards Genshin to begin with.
• That One Level: The bad rep of Mission 136 is hard to overestimate. After all these years, it established itself as the hardest level in the entire game, being even harder than the final boss (who is no less infamous, but is at least cheesable and could be worked around more easily). Basically, Mission 136 is a combination of all infamously challenging wave layouts, ramped up to eleven. A constantly incoming mook that's both sturdy, resistant, and hits hard?^note Prisoner. Check. Frequent damage sponges?^note Crank and Putrid. Check. Two Charged Zombies coming at once? Check. Insectoids? Make it double. Oh, and don't forget the relatively short delay between all of these, and needing absurd luck to get an alright headstart. Managing to beat this mission on three stars without use of buffs and anything meta is considered an achievement for a reason. It's also worth noting that this is the second level of the only linear stage in the game, meaning that it's a massive unavoidable roadblock, only adding to the mission's infamy.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Practically any type of daily quest can become this if it requires using a bad unit. However, one specific combination is hated more than the others: "Use Chopper's activated ability X times". Of all units with manually activated perks, Chopper's is the hardest to farm because it requires him to be at <50% health, and then it has a cooldown of a whole minute, which is also the same time it takes for Chopper to recharge himself. The way this quest is consistently tedious and demanding is what has earned it its infamy.
  • During the days of the old daily quest system, many people hated star acquisition quests, as they were very tedious, requiring you to spend more fuel than on other tasks.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Not just one, but a whole group. Some people think this way towards the Marauders. Simply being other human enemies trying to stop Bill and his group, some people appreciated the fact that they brought in some unique gameplay compared to simply fighting hordes of zombies due to their smarter AI, need to fight other turned zombies, and ranged weaponry. And even just the more down-to-earth traditional situation of fighting other survivors was an interesting enough premise. Sadly, the Marauders are featured as enemies in a grand total of 5 missions, 2 supply runs, and 1 event. Most fans agree that they should’ve been expanded upon, maybe even over the super mutated alien blue energy stuff that takes up the late game, which could have come off as overbearing to some.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The potential for some kind of an interesting story was present in the beginning. A lot of players were interested in where it was going, especially considering that Dead Ahead is praised for having a more unique take on the Zombie Apocalypse compared to other media, even by those who don't like the game very much. However, the trainwreck would start with all the unit's backstories being deleted and likely reconned, likely because all of them were Whole Plot References with barely anything original. Even though it means the cast can't be just a bunch of unoriginal ideas, which is a good thing, it still kills any chance of the units being actual official characters. It gets worse in the game, as all it has are some short cutscenes that barely tell or do anything. Then the intro to Location 4 (halfway through the game) is the last proper cutscene in the game, with the only other cutscene left being Bill literally saying "so easy" at the Final Boss. And then the Marauders; likely the only enemies that aren't mindless monsters, appear in a grand total of 5 missions, and disappear after their final mission together in Location 5, Mission 91. Even though they barely had any characterization as well, it still ended any potential for an interesting antagonistic group. Overall, fans are disappointed. With the missing characterization of the units who could've been a unique cast of characters, to the half-baked incomplete "storyline" that had no real substance to begin with, and the unexplored universe that could've been so interesting with just some worldbuilding, it all leaves fans a lot to be desired when it had so much great potential.
• Ugly Cute:
  • While some of the zombies can easily shift into pure Body Horror territory, most of the more humanoid ones are this, since they basically look like someone splattered green paint on them. This, combined with their big eyes, vacant expressions and the way they gawk at seemingly nothing with their mouths open only served to endear than to horrify.
  • The Free Hugs zombie is basically this. Completely harmless (has an AI that prevents her from doing anything, hence being the most harmless zombie ever), standing still with an adorably-dumb stare with the 'Free Hugs' sign still sticking to her chest, many a player have expressed their feelings of not wanting to kill her, despite doing so nets you 50 Rage points. No wonder she's the mascot of the first Dead Ahead game. This is reflected in the fact that all units on the field just ignore her. There's a chance she might be caught in the crossfire, though.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Among 100+ missions in the game, negative weather effects are used in less than 10 missions total, and almost all of those take place during the first half of the game.