YMMV / Zombie Army Trilogy

• Anti-Climax Boss: The fight with the Clone Commanders, the true Big Bads of the series and True Final Boss of Dead War as a whole, ends up being severely disappointing despite twenty chapters worth of build-up. While the arena looks visually impressive and their leader merges with the imposing-looking void bomb, the actual fight boils down to killing four reskinned Zombie Commanders, which was already done prior with Baron Umbra. The void bomb itself doesn't do much either, only sometimes electrifying the ground in a few places.
• Best Boss Ever: The Hell Machine in Dead War is an absolutely colossal Military Mashup Machine made out of flesh and metal, packing enough guns and firepower to lay siege to an entire city by itself. The fight against it is spectacular enough to warrant an entire level to itself, a multi-stage battle that has you destroy its massive turrets, sneak inside to shoot its beating hearts, face its deadly Uberwaffe and of course slaughter the hordes of zombies that defend it.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Being a spin-off from the Sniper Elite series, the slow-motion kill shots return in glorious fashion. Nothing makes a zombie kill quite as satisfying as watching your bullet tear through the zombie's bones and organs, especially if you manage to let it go off against an elite zombie.
  • After finally defeating Hitler's demonic avatar in the final mission of Zombie Army Trilogy, Hitler is functionally reduced to an ordinary zombie that revives no matter how much damage you inflict on him. You are supposed to throw him into the Hellmouth to end the game, but nothing is stopping you from taking your frustrations out on him first. There are also a few execution devices in the surrounding rooms that just so happen to have opened right after Hitler was defeated...
  • In the final level of Dead War, Hitler summons a massive horde of Hitler clones in a last-ditch effort to kill you after his Hell Machine is destroyed, allowing you to mow down the mad Führer over and over again until the real one has finally exhausted his powers.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In ZAT, due to their One-Hit Kill damage on regular zombies, it's rare to encounter players online who don't use the Webley revolver and the shotgun. It's not helped by all the SMGs having piss poor accuracy and damage. Dead War largely avoids this by rebalancing most of the sidearms and secondary weapons so they're all viable.
• Complete Monster: Adolf Hitler himself is first introduced shooting one of his generals in the head when he proposes surrender, and has the undead rise from their graves, resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent civilians, including children. During the outbreak, Hitler shoots another officer out of simple frustration, and upon learning that the relic that was supposed to protect him was dismantled rendering it useless, beats the third officer to death with it before he is mauled to death. Rising from the dead three months later, still maintaining his sapience, Hitler finds the Book of Souls and uses it to make himself more powerful. Hitler supplies humans to his undead minions to keep them in line, sometimes enslaving other humans to do manual labor before letting the zombies kill them. Hitler announces his intent to use the full occult power to turn the planet into a world of the undead, before he is defeated and thrown into Hell. Omnicidal, overconfident, and egotistical, Hitler unleashed the dead simply because he could not stand the idea of losing, and upon returning from the dead, shows he is just as evil and as monstrous as he was in life.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • In the original standalone releases of Nazi Zombie Army 1 & 2, skeletons are this. They move a lot faster than regular zombies and the only way to destroy them is with a precise shot to their glowing heart. Thankfully they are significantly more fragile in Zombie Army Trilogy, where you can break them to pieces with a single kick.
  • The MG42 and chainsaw elites are both extremely dangerous and eat entire clips of headshots before they finally go down. The former especially, as they are encountered regularly and one of the few enemy types with a ranged attack, as well as pretty damn accurate with them. God help you when you encounter these guys in close confines.
  • Dead War additionally introduces the likes of Blind Screamers, Commanders and Shadow Demons into the pot.
    • Despite their lack of vision, Blind Screamers are insanely tough unless shot at the glowing weakspot on their back, or when killed by a takedown, the former of which is incredibly hard and frustrating to do if they already know where you are as they will rush you non-stop, and the latter requires you to pull it off on an unaware one. While most of them can simply be avoided by sneaking past them, Horde mode provides you no such opportunities.
    • Like the other Officer types, Commanders themselves are not remotely dangerous. They only have a fairly weak pistol to attack you with. The real danger comes from their support ability, which makes regular zombies go into a frenzy and start erratically sprinting after you. These can be a real pest to deal with if you don't take out the Commander fast, as they move fast enough that they catch up fairly quickly even while in slow-motion and disrupt you from taking out other dangerous targets. There is no limit to how many zombies the Commander can frenzy either, so while you struggle to get a shot at his weakspot he keeps making more frenzy zombies to distract you. Do the math. Even worse, the "Dead Zeppelin" DLC introduced a new sub-type of Commander that wears a protective plate over his heart, making them even more difficult to deal with.
    • While Shadow Demons on their own are not a large threat, since they go down rather quickly when shot at their glowing weakspot and you can sidestep their ripples, the problem arises when there's a horde of other zombies separating you from them, whereupon they will quickly become annoying pests that kill you in seconds because of their ability spams. If a ripple hits you while you're preoccupied by the metric ton of zombies in front of you, a Shadow Demon will pull you to its location and deal an aggravatingly high amount of damage with its screams, after which it will teleport away to repeat the process. Even worse still is that a ripple can relocate you to very dangerous or inconvenient positions depending on where the Demon was at when it hit you. Woe be you if there are many of them attacking you at once. Their only saving grace is that they are encountered very rarely.
• Evil Is Cool: The undead zeppelin that terrorizes the Alps in the "Alpine Blitz" and "Dead Zeppelin" DLCs is a massive Cool Airship with a will of its own, courtesy of an occult-powered Artificial Intelligence, which makes for an incredibly memorable threat and an imposing image to see looming in the air.
• Fridge Brilliance: Every Sniper Elite game since V2 has had a "Kill Hitler" mission. How is it he keeps coming back? Well, with the Sagarmatha Relic in his possession, it's entirely possible Hitler just keeps getting resurrected after each assassination.
• Game-Breaker: In Dead War, the shotgun mortar snaps the difficulty in half. It's effectively a grenade launcher that, when fully upgraded, can shoot fire rounds, electric rounds, and good, old fashioned explosive rounds, all of which can destroy dozens of zombies in one shot. It's not quite as effective against elites, but elites without regular zombies backing them up are no problem for your rifle or sidearm. Its only true limitations are its limited ammo supply, which can be negated with the shotgun ammo perk, and the fact it's DLC exclusive. At least, until it and the first Season Pass were made permanently free in February 2022.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The grenade-toting Suiciders are the series' staple when it comes to irritating pests to deal with. Not only will they run at you, which makes sniping them down tougher than it already is, even more so if they're body-blocked by a dense mob, if a Suicider gets up in your face it will blow itself up, dealing high-to-lethal damage that will likely kill you in one hit, or leave you low enough on health to be finished off by nearby zombies. And they don't just come in single numbers, either, with Dead War cranking their amounts up to truly ridiculous heights, especially if you have 4 players or have set the zombie count to that level, where about two dozen Suiciders rushing at you per horde is considered to be few. And that's not even getting to the new Suicide Commanders, who can summon a bunch of them from under your feet to blow you up, which can happen while you're being bumrushed by regular Suiciders as well. You will quickly learn to cringe at the sound of their screeching.
  • In Dead War, creepers and enraged zombies. They get up in your face and swarm you very quickly.
  • The spitter type zombies are also the bane of many players' existence due to the stumbling and slowing properties of their acid, which knocks you out of focus aiming and also disables your sprint, forcing you to slowly inch your way out of the puddle while the nearby horde gets to freely claw at you.
• Nightmare Fuel: The very premise of an army of Nazi zombies is horrific. It only gets worse as Hitler becomes an Omnicidal Maniac.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: 4 rebalanced the sidearms to be more useful across the board, gives you access to powerful melee abilities, allows the customization of weapons, provides more means to get healed, allows you to revive yourself when downed solo and includes perks, making it easier this time around.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Dismemberment in Dead War. Although not strictly necessary to progress, it is often the requirement to unlock weapon mods and appears as the bonus objective in some levels. While the general idea is that shooting a zombie's limb beneath the joint will break it off, most of the time, the target will just drop dead after being shot enough times without any dismemberment happening, and rendering a zombie into giblets somehow doesn't count despite you technically removing all four extremities at once. It's typically easier to do with rifles, as their firepower is often high enough that a single shot can snap off a leg or arm, but woe be you if the challenge demands you to do so with a submachine gun or pistol, even more so if it requires the removal of a specific limb instead of general dismemberment.
• Scrappy Weapon: Unfortunately, the big circular saw is not an example of Chainsaw Good. The idea behind picking up a Butcher's giant, two-bladed saw and running amok through a crowd of zombies is freaking awesome, but sadly it ends up too risky and situational. While the saw absolutely does cut enemies to ribbons, its pitifully short range means that you have to go within enemy attack distance for it to start doing any of that damage. No problem if the enemies are all in a perfectly straight line, but since the frequent hordes tend to quickly surround you, they usually end up overwhelming you fast. The other heavy weapons are all more reliable and powerful options.
• That One Boss: Hitler can be very aggravating. Not only does he summon a legion of zombies, but you have to break down doors and grab the corpses and throw them into the Hellmouth, right at the summoning area, and as you destroy more corpses, more difficult zombies appear, so expect a very aggravating battle.
• That One Level: The final level of Zombie Army Trilogy, "Army of Darkness", is a slog. Not only does it end with the boss fight with Hitler, itself a giant pain in the ass, but you'll be dealing with tons of armored enemies in cramped areas. This makes it all too easy to get swarmed in no time flat. There's even an area where you must deal with two chainsaw mooks while the room is trying to crush you.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Weapon upgrade challenges that require dismemberments are universally regarded as annoying and time-wasting to do, especially ones targeting the legs of zombies, owing to the randomness of whether your shots will shear off a specific bodypart or just kill a zombie outright, the latter of which happens way more often than you'd think, thus wasting precious time and ammunition. This is not helped by how most of these challenges tend to plague secondary weapons and sidearms, all of which have low ammo and should not be used willy-nilly, presenting a case of Fake Longevity by technicality.
  • Those that demand multi-kills with one shot are likewise a pain in the ass to unlock, especially those belonging to submachineguns, as those weapons naturally don't have a lot of stopping power and penetration to begin with. They are a bit less of a pain on rifles and high-powered pistols, but can be highly inconvenient at times to pull off.
  • Weapon masteries in Dead War run the gamut between "walk in the park" and "soul-crushingly frustrating" in terms of difficulty.
    • For base-game weapons, mastering the Thompson and C96 are a giant pain in the neck, with the former requiring 200 leg dismemberments and the latter demanding 200 ricochet kills, respectively. Getting leg dismemberments is already a lot harder than it sounds due to the fact that only shots to the shin of the zombies will break their legs off, whereas thigh shots will either outright kill or cause them to gib, which somehow doesn't count for the purpose of the challenge. As for the C96, ricochet kills take literal ages to rack up, considering the fact that not a lot of the areas in the game contain hard flooring or walls to bounce your shots off of, and even when you can find those, it's still going to take a considerable amount of ammo to kill one zombie that way. Needless to say, either of these challenges will take a ton of grinding to unlock, especially when taking into account the low total ammo of your secondaries and sidearms, whereas the others such as the Gewehr 43's Scope Snipe requirement are trivial by comparison.
    • For DLC weapons, the M1895 will give you some trouble, as you will need to rack up 50 kills without missing a single hit. That means no shooting explosive barrels or other environmental objects, and if there is a long and intense fight up ahead where zombies will be getting in your face all the time, you'll be pretty much restricted to your secondary and sidearm for the entire time unless your close-ranged aiming skills are really on point.
  • Dead War Level 5 (Molten Madness) Mission 2 (Hot on the Trail) has the "Deadeye" Challenge, which requires you to kill 2 Zombie Snipers whilst they are in midleap. Related, doing this on just one Zombie Sniper is how you unlock their sticker in the collectibles menu. The problem is that, whereas Zombie Snipers had relatively slow, almost lazy, gliding leaps in the original Zombie Army Trilogy, Dead War changed that to them instead zipping around like fleas on speed. They move so fast that even using the Empty Lung command, which normally slows the game down to borderline Bullet Time, doesn't keep them from being too fast to track. Most players default to camping under a specific rooftop, hoping the snipers will jump to it, and then praying to get lucky whilst blasting away with an upgraded shotgun or submachine gun when they think the Sniper is about to leap.

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