Dealing with other playersĪnother promising feature in Beyond the Dead is the ability to battle other players. It takes a mixture of leveling and fusion to create a formidable team. Fusing two similar survivors will evolve them into better ones. To level up a survivor, you must pay a silver fee and then combine him or her with other survivor cards or items. Each one can be not only leveled up, but also evolved into stronger forms. The ability to develop survivors adds depth as well. You can also boost their damage by finding or purchasing new weapons, each with its own range, rate of fire, and ammo capacity. They also come equipped with special abilities like the chance for the whole party to deliver extra damage during attacks. Survivors have their own attack and defense stats that determine how effectively the will perform in battle. Each survivor’s card displays beautiful artwork (much better drawn than the actual sprites, as usual with these games) and a backstory that fleshes out the game’s setting. Over 100 unique survivors wait to be found and join your team. Survivorsīuilding that team (only five survivors can fight together at a time) is the real draw in Beyond the Dead. Level ups refill energy, unlock new items and buildings for purchase, and give you Skill Points with which to boost your team’s abilities. As for experience, you’ll level up when you gain enough of it. These lockers contain random rewards of varying rareness. But the energy costs and slow rate of refill do slow the game down and make it less exciting than it should be.Ĭompleting missions gets you experience, silver, and battlefield lockers. Energy refills over time – remember, you’re supposed to return to Beyond the Dead throughout the day.
Each attack costs energy, as does searching buildings. Just select the correct target enemy, tap Attack, and you’ll deal some damage. The actual combat is still casual game simple, though. You can’t be killed while out in the wild, but looking around an area and hunting zombies is far more interesting than your average city builder’s gameplay. The best part of these is that most involve visiting areas with actual complex maps and wandering zombies and then doing some exploration or combat. Missions include such objectives as defeating certain enemies in an area, searching specific buildings, challenging other players, and more. Many are available for only a limited time, which creates a sense of urgency that you don’t usually get and also matches the desperate nature of the game’s setting. You’ll have loads of them to choose from at any given time. But Beyond the Dead outdoes many such games with the complexity and variety of missions it offers. Again, bite-sized missions are a common component of mobile city building games. Missionsįrom the homebase, you can browse and take on missions in the outside world. Checking in and collecting money to spend on further buildings and supplies becomes a core part of the gameplay routine.
In actual gameplay terms, buildings mostly just produce silver (soft currency) over time. These all fit the in-universe fiction of survival versus the zombie plague, such as a chicken coop producing food for your team.
This begins with staking out a patch of land in the wilderness and setting up a tent to sleep in.Īs time goes on, players can purchase new buildings and items for their settlement. The player’s first order of business is to establish a base to defend against the undead. In Beyond the Dead, the world has been overrun by a plague of flesh-eating zombies. But this one’s mixture of card collecting and town building with a zombie apocalypse still makes it worth a look for zombie-loving casual gamers. Coming from GREE’s Vancouver-based studio, Beyond the Dead is more of a traditional mobile game than the two titles I just mentioned. Mobile publishing giant GREE has recently tossed its own hat into the world of zombie games with Beyond the Dead. A couple of iOS examples: The Walking Dead is quite a popular adventure game, and cult favorite Zombies!!! mixes the undead with a dice-rolling board game. And while zombies lend themselves especially well to action and shooter games, they also pop up in many other genres. There’s no shortage of zombie games in the modern age, not even on mobile.