Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army

My first session with Nazi Zombie Army was solo, which turned out to be the wrong call. The five-mission campaign across ruined Berlin is genuinely tense when you're alone, but without a squad to revive you, every checkpoint siege can grind into pure frustration. The game was built for co-op and barely tries to hide it. Once I got three people in the lobby, something clicked. The structure will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has put time into Left 4 Dead. You push through linear stretches of bombed-out streets, resupply at safehouses, and then hold your position through wave sieges before moving on. Rebellion didn't reinvent that loop, they dropped Sniper Elite V2's mechanics straight into it. That means your primary tool is a bolt-action rifle, not a shotgun, and the difference matters more than you'd expect. Picking a good elevated position, spotting rooftop-hopping sniper zombies before they spot you, and lining up a shot that chains through three shambling soldiers in a row, that is where the game earns its keep. The X-ray kill cam fires every time you land a quality shot, tracking the bullet in slow motion through decaying organs, and it stays satisfying longer than it has any right to. Landmines, tripwires, and frag grenades let you prep kill zones before the hordes arrive, which adds a thin but real layer of positioning. The enemy roster is a mixed bag. Standard undead soldiers are slow-moving and exist mainly to eat bullets in bulk. Suicide bombers sprint at you screaming, which is legitimately startling the first few times. Rooftop sniper zombies are a smart design, you actually need your rifle to deal with them properly. The armored MG42-toting general zombies require multiple headshots and become a chore when half a dozen appear in a single level. Worst of the lot are the skeletons. They burst out of portals, move so fast and jerkily that your rifle is almost useless against them, and force you to dump SMG or Thompson ammo you really can't spare. It's the one moment where the "sniper" branding actively works against the game. Solo play exposes every rough edge: no AI companions, no revive, fixed enemy spawns with no director randomizing them, and bosses clearly designed for split attention. The difficulty doesn't scale if a co-op partner drops out mid-mission either, so a four-player run that loses two people partway through can become practically unwinnable. On the technical side, the five-mission campaign wraps up in roughly three to four hours with a full squad, and there's limited pull to replay it beyond chasing the leaderboard score system, which rewards long-range kills and headshots. Hidden gold and collectible bottles of blood exist, but they're a thin incentive. Worth flagging for anyone browsing today: Rebellion themselves note that a remastered version of this content exists in Zombie Army Trilogy, which packages this campaign alongside its sequel and a third chapter. If you don't already own NZA and you're starting fresh, that collection is worth comparing. For what this original release is, though, a compact, deliberately silly co-op shooter built around one genuinely great mechanic, it holds up as a Friday night session with friends who are up for something brainless and loud. Alex, Scout Team