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Yet Another Zombie Survivors is yet another entry in the Vampire Survivors-style action roguelike genre. Instead of spells and magical weapons, it has firearms and instead of mowing down fantasy beasties, you get to mow down zombies, which is always a good time.
Though the game trods familiar ground, it adds enough changes to the mix to make it worth a go, especially if you like reducing zombies into mulch (and who doesn’t?). To keep you one step ahead of the ravening hordes, and keep your build nice and optimized, here are some beginner tips to help you out.
This game is in Early Access and under active development. The information below may no longer be valid upon future updates or when the game is fully released.
Always Be Moving
Though zombies are slow and stupid, there’s a whole lot of them, and they always know where you are. So if you want to stay alive, you need to always be moving. Aside from a few quick pit stops to pick up items, squadmates, or new upgrades, there’s very little reason to ever stop moving.
This is especially true when the zombies get faster, and some burlier ones get thrown into the mix, since even if you can hold the normie zombies at bay with your firepower, boss zombies take longer to kill and deal a lot of damage when they land a hit.
Mind Your Ranges
You might have noticed that each class works optimally at different ranges. The Tank, for instance with his Shotgun deals the most damage up close since he fires multiple pellets in a cone shape and enemies close up are more likely to catch more than one pellet. Or the Ghost, which fights mostly in melee range since they use a sword.
If you want to cover all ranges, consider a SWAT, Tank, and Engineer Combo, especially if you have the Sniper Rifle upgrade for the SWAT.
In general, you want a mix of effective ranges when you assemble your squad as well as when you pick abilities, so you’re effective at all ranges. However, you can also succeed if you specialize at hitting enemies at a certain range and then making sure enemies stay at that range.
Always Look For A Way Out
You’re always going to get surrounded, that’s just how the genre works. But being surrounded doesn’t mean death and as long as you’ve got health, you can fight. The trick is to never stay surrounded, by making sure you can spot a way out.
Zombies come at you in staggered waves, which means that there are gaps in the walls of the living dead headed your way. As long as you can identify them, you can traverse them and take little to no damage. This gets more difficult late in a run when zombies get faster and elites get more frequent, but as long as you keep a cool head, you’re liable to last a little longer.
Experiment With Training
Training is the main meta-progression system in YAZS, which is unlocked after your first game is over. You get points to spend in Training during a run from picking up money. After collecting a certain amount, you get a point, and the cost of the next point goes up.
To refund your points, you have to select the upgrade and press the refund points button (E/Y/Triangle) as many times as the amount of levels on the upgrade you want back.
You use these points in the Training screen to get permanent upgrades, but an important thing to remember is that these points are always refundable at no loss, and you can invest them as you see fit. So if you don’t like your Training setup or just want to experiment, feel free to do so.
Focus Your Upgrades
Early on in a run, you want upgrades that give you a quick time to kill since the horde builds up quickly. More flashy options with long cooldowns between firing can often get you killed since even though they kill more enemies when they go off, their long windup means they still kill less enemies.
This means that more often than not, your best bet is to upgrade your weapons first, since they have little to no cooldown. On top of that, weapons evolve when you upgrade them enough, getting a huge boost in power when they do.
A notable exception to this is the Engineer, whose main weapon takes too long to get powerful, but has a suite of abilities that are strong and have relatively short cooldowns.
Save Magnets
Magnets are powerful pick-ups that will attract all gems on the map to you, likely granting you multiple level-ups in the process. They’re an uncommon drop, so your first instinct might be to pick them up as you see them, but try not to.
The Magnet can save you a lot of time and a shot in the arm when you need it, but if you’re already doing a good job of collecting experience gems, you’re better off leaving them they for when you actually need them. All the colored pick-ups (Money, Magnets, and Health) don’t decay and stay on the ground until you pick them up or the level ends.
Hunt Achievements
Now, of course you want achievements, and you’re likely to unlock many without even trying, but since achievements are tied to some powerful unlocks in YAZS, you might want to set out in every run with an achievement in mind to complete.
Of course, you don’t need this mindset right away, but achievements unlock some really nice items and sometimes the method of unlocking can seem unintuitive, which is why it’s a good idea to look in the achievements menu once in a while.