Over 9000 Zombies!

My honest reaction after the first twenty minutes solo: this feels like it was calibrated for two people and shipped anyway. Over 9000 Zombies! is a top-down twin-stick shooter with a light tower-defense layer bolted on, built entirely by one developer. You shoot, collect scrap from kills, spend that scrap on barricades and automated turrets, then repeat until the horde outscales your setup or you run out of patience. The core loop is tight enough for short sessions, but it exposes its seams quickly when you're playing alone. The weapon progression is genuinely the best thing here. You start with a pistol and unlock new guns by filling kill-based XP bars per weapon class, so you're pushed to actually use the SMG, the shotgun, the grenade launcher, rather than camping one loadout. The top of the tree has real teeth: a vulcan minigun, a tri-beam plasma rifle, and a nuke RPG that clears rooms with area-of-effect blasts. Getting there takes several runs, which gives the game more staying power than it first appears. On the turret side, you can place up to six at a time, ranging from basic machine-gun sentries up to grenade launchers, rocket turrets, and plasma-burst options, each costing escalating amounts of scrap. The placement cap forces real decisions about chokepoints, especially once every fifth day throws fire-spitting zombie variants at you and your SMG suddenly feels like a water pistol. Where things get wobbly: the game is co-op-first and barely tries to hide it. Single-player hordes are tuned for multiple shooters, and the six-turret cap that feels like a strategic puzzle in co-op just feels punishing when you're also expected to kite, build, collect, and reload by yourself. Reviewers at launch flagged the solo difficulty as rough, and the online servers today are essentially empty, which means your co-op options are limited to local four-player or convincing a friend to join your two-player online session the old-fashioned way. The day-night cycle adds a real pressure shift - nights crater your visibility to a small lamp radius and make target identification genuinely stressful - but zombie AI is basic enough that exploiting choke geometry near water edges can trivialise early days with minimal turret investment. There are also persistent reports of early-build netcode lag on the client side during online sessions, and the keyboard default controls put the build menu on B and the weapon inventory on I, both far from WASD, which means you will die the first time you try to swap turrets mid-wave without a controller. Plug in a pad. The Steam Workshop support and custom map editor give the game more shelf life than it would have otherwise, and the pixel art with dynamic shadow effects during night phases looks cleaner than you'd expect from a one-person project. The soundtrack is loud electro-rock, which either fits the vibe or drives you off within a session. Steam's player reviews sit at 87% positive across over 1,200 ratings, so the audience that clicks with this clearly does click hard. But the map count is small, enemy AI has one mode (walk toward player), and once you've cracked the optimal turret placement the difficulty oscillates between easy and suddenly dead rather than building tension cleanly.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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