Dead Ahead: Zombie Warfare

PVE strategy games. Survival

Ratings

Age

13+

Strategy

Languages

English

Latest Version 4.4.3

Tue Sep 15 2026

Hello, survivors! Here's what's new in this update:

- Seasonal event "Last Resort", where you can obtain new units and several unit skins

- Units: Haruko and Demolitionist

- Skins for Abby, Hero, Soldier, Builder, Firefighter, Lionheart, Grenadier, and Ranger

- Charms: Maneki-neko and Shark Tooth

- Item sets: Relics and Trauma Kit

- A Supply Run at Location 10

And lots of other smaller changes!

Resist and defy the evil undead in this new tactical survival sequel of Dead Ahead! Fight for freedom and become a fearless slayer of the undead in one of the most fun survival games of the year! Kill raid after raid of zombies, collect supplies, look for survivors and most importantly... create your own legacy! Defend your bus and endure opponents funnier than any devil or demon! Break through barricades while you slaughter the corrupt corpses. Gather your team of gladiators and send them one by one into battle! Use any means necessary to ward off the horde of pixel crazed flesh eaters! Slash, shoot or burn the dead with barrels, Molotov cocktails and grenades. Be direct and explosive or stealthy kill your opponents.

Dinsun Expert Review

Our Expert Score

88/100

Dead Ahead: Zombie Warfare is a standout in the strategy genre, mixing tactical unit management with a gritty, pixel-art aesthetic. The gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying: you defend your bus from oncoming hordes while deploying a variety of survivors, each with unique roles like the heavy-hitting Chopper or the quick-striking Mechanic. It strikes a great balance between casual play and deep strategy, especially when you start factoring in unit synergies and gear upgrades.

What keeps me coming back is the sense of progression and the challenge. The levels get tough quickly, forcing you to actually think about your deck composition rather than just spamming units. Whether you're clearing barricades in the main campaign or testing your mettle in the PvP skirmishes, the game feels fair but demanding. It's a must-play for anyone who loves tower defense with a post-apocalyptic twist.

Dinsun reviewed on: Tue Feb 24 2026

Features

Blood-and-guts action-strategy game with a sense of humor

A huge world with numerous locations to explore

Dozens of survivor units and zombies

Upgrades, special items, and optional quests

Classic pixel art style

PvP Skirmish mode for competitive play

Tips & Walkthrough

Defending Your Bus

The core of the game is protecting your bus at all costs. You must deploy units using courage points to stop zombies from reaching the vehicle. As you progress, you'll need to upgrade the bus's durability and offensive capabilities to survive more aggressive waves.

Unit Management and Synergies

Success depends on building a balanced team. Combine melee units to hold the line with ranged units for fire support. Pay attention to Team Powers; using multiple units from the same faction (like Marines or Police) grants significant combat bonuses.

Gameplays

Tactical Combat

Engage in real-time tactical battles where you manage resources to deploy units. You must decide when to use support items like water barrels or medkits to swing the tide of battle against diverse zombie types.

Resource Collection and Upgrading

Scavenge for items and coins across a massive map with numerous locations. Use these resources to level up your survivors, improve their stats, and equip them with gear sets to increase their effectiveness in combat.

Screenshot

Q&A

Courage points generate automatically over time during a mission. You can speed up the generation by using specific items or upgrading certain unit abilities.

Ratings & Reviews

Amazing game with only one suggestion.

Mon Nov 06 2023 Fishbearer54

Overall, dead ahead zombie warfare provides users with a challenge to defeat the zombie plague. The game is very detailed and provides the player with many different choices. These choices can be units, the items you equip them with, main campaign, PVP, weekly events, and also annual events. Each of these parts make the game extremely fun and entertaining. However, there is one issue I have faced while playing this game. In order to pay for and upgrade units, you require an absurd amount of coins and power points, making the game unnecessarily grindy in nature. I admit that the devs have tried to fix this problem by lowering prices of unit upgrades and doubling supply runs rewards on weekends, but the situation still remains. I understand there is an easy way to farm coins by using a unit called Austin, but he is exclusive and costs a fair amount of green cash (another in game currency, NOT USD). This, once again, only resolves part of the issue. Even though coins can be farmed, the other necessary resource, power points, have yet to be more easily obtained. I would like to end this review on a good note. Dead Ahead Zombie Warfare is an amazing strategy game that presents its players with a fun challenge. While there are still some flaws, nobody can expect a game to be perfect. The devs are constantly adding more to the game and rebalancing it as well. I’m sure the grindy nature of the game will be addressed, I just hope it will be in the near future.

Actually really fun!

Thu Jul 13 2023 Aaron Wesley

Yes I’m a real person this is not a fake review… see 1,2,3 monkey in a Christmas tree?? Idky but that should prove I’m real lol… anyways… At first glance it’s kinda basic… it’s very grindy too so if you don’t like grinding and slowly leveling units up and their gear this game may not be for you. If however you do like that sort of game it’s got the cool retro graphics… it’s got tons of small things that make it cool like set bonuses on gear and class bonuses for multiple various units that have the same class. There’s a little pvp and the strategy implementation with different teams and abilities make this game all around fun. Again if that’s your kind of game. I sit in my garage in my free time playing this game chillin. I don’t mind the slow pace and the grinding so it’s chill. Oh yea it’s gonna heavily push ads on you, but again if ur already down with grinding and slow pace and chilling then you’ll actually grow to appreciate the ads because watching them gives you way more extra in game currency then you’d get without it. So watch out for the ad bonuses because they help you maintain a somewhat decent pace as far as upgrading gear and leveling your squad up. I give it 5 stars because it is a 5 star game in my book as far as what I wanted to play and mostly because I’m not trying to just be a critic… I have my issues and even within my issues it’s still a great game! No need to nit pick! Thanks for reading!

Excellent

Sun Sep 01 2019 In depth perception

Great gameplay. Great atmosphere. Great sound. Great art style. (I absolutely love how the wind rustles through the hair and the clothes of the units). The bus, the landscapes and the buildings are all wonderfully dilapidated and run-down. The music is both melancholy and haunting, and a huge contributor to the game's amazing atmosphere. It's is a little on the difficult side, but for some this is part of what makes it such an strong title. I wish there were a bit more 'redneck, trailer folk, white trash' type units. These units are, dare I say, endearing? In my opinion some of the units, like Carlos and the swat team, don't really fit into the ethos they have created. But this comes down to personal presence and is a minor gripe - because overall, the game is excellent. It is both unique and familiar, cohesive and well crafted - and yet wonderfully subversive. The gameplay is quick and fun. The wide range of units and enemies does help with the occasional threat of repetition. The ability to swap parts from unit to unit would be a great addition. Again, this is a personal and minor gripe. Overall this little game is a well polished 'experience' that feels much larger than its parts - a true gem in a sea of mediocre titles that flood our game stores everyday. I hope this company sticks around and is either working on a successor, or perhaps a new IP, or both. Don't miss this gem.

Great game but needs balance

Sun Dec 18 2022 Colossal Bog

ThisGame has good gameplay, great artwork and animation. It requires different strategies to complete the various missions. You get to use/purchase lots of interesting units to form your team. You also end up fighting all kinds of crazy zombies and zombie like creatures that get weirder and more alien as the game progresses. I think one of the downsides of the game is that each time you upgrade a unit, it is a little underwhelming. The unit only get a slight increase in health and damage. Another downside is the game begins to really grind partway through location six. There are three types of currency bucks, gold and purple power points.I’ve listed them in rarity or difficulty to obtain. As the game progresses you end up with a massive surplus of purple power points, then it’s somewhat hard to accumulate gold and then extremely hard to accumulate bucks. Even if you watch an ad after every mission and get the bonus gold the game is still massively paid to play once you get into location seven. You get a reward for clearing all the missions in a location and for leveling up your blue stars, but as the game progresses the rewards don’t really get much better. At the beginning of the game I recommend leveling up your redneck and mechanic and getting Policeman Diaz as soon as possible. Convert the redneck to a mechanic for 20 bucks and then the redneck in the mechanic can heal the bus 5% each time they enter the battlefield. In my opinion, the grenadier is better than the construction worker and a lumberjack as melee unit.

Super cool game but could use some improvement

Tue Nov 22 2022 staaaaaars

One thing I got to say about this game is everything is good about it the graphics the storyline and the different types of characters and zombies but the thing I would like to change about this game is one thing the pay to win aspect four so first of all let me just tell you something here the game is completely fine fun it’s too hard when you get further into the game it just gets difficult over time and you can’t really get a good character that can actually illuminate until those offers pop in to the shop the psycho pack the swap pack the special ops pack like one of those I mean I love spending money on this game because I love the game well I’m Donna losing all the time because I don’t get good characters I can’t even get a character unless I buy stuff and get 1000 coins just to get a character even though you get two coins for just one match I hope you would put this in consideration of maybe lowering the prices of the packs you want money and you need money because you’re a company I get it but like it’s so unfair for noobs you don’t want to pay to win and then they will just delete the game after because they can’t even get one pack pass one level.

Fair but i have a problem

Thu Jun 17 2021 BumBumTickleBottoms

I like and enjoy the game. But i have a problem. The games shows that something is wrong and displays red text across the screen. This stops me from playing what I believe is an online mode but as far as i am aware I cant play it. Looking at it yes it says you have to make a game center account. But due to some complications with my old Game Center account being hacked or taken by someone i cant make a Game Center account. I have one but its not working and its been a full year of constant trying and troubleshooting. But that’s enough of talking about that, the problem is not being able to access a big part of this amazing game. I love it but the timer on the fuel is a bit harsh and not at all fun especially the limit of fuel you get is 20 you can only play the game for 5-6 minutes then you have to wait 1 hour till your full on fuel. If you could please add an option to either upgrade the fuel or remove the timer and give us some way to earn fuel through missions (side missions) rather then buy it, would be nice. Otherwise the game is good bit difficult to gather supplies to get 3 stars on stuff and its making me want to delete the game because the fuel situation, i do want to keep playing so i can have something to look forward. I give this game a fair 3 stars, i will write a better review when this game has gotten the updates that will improve the experience of this overall great game. Please developers contact me.

Almost perfect

Mon Mar 02 2026 CapShap

The game is fantastic…. However, I have some grievances. The only MAJOR down side is the special event skins for units to change team powers. They only appear in the shard shop and that resets every 7 days, cost 50 of the special tokens you get from obtaining epic or legendary charms, which you only get one epic every 20ish times you open a charm crate and a legendary every 30ish times. Not to mention charm crates cost 10 Red flares which are sort of unreasonably hard to obtain.… I would be able to bare all of that if I could only CHOSE the special skin I need/want for team powers. Instead I have to wait for it to cycle through the weekly shards shop of countless other unit skins, AND MOST OF THE UNITS THAT ARE IN THE SHOP I DON’T EVEN OWN!!! SO I CAN’T EVEN BUY THE SKIN IF I WANTED TO BECAUSE I DON’T EVEN OWN THE UNIT!!!! WHY OFFER ME A SKIN FOR A UNIT I DON’T OWN FOR A WEEK!!! ONLY TO TURN AROUND AND DO IT AGAIN THE NEXT WEEK!!!! AND ALSO EVEN IF I JUST WANTED TO BUY THE UNIT FOR REAL MONEY SO I COULD GET THE SPECIAL SKIN IN THE SHARDS SHOP, I CAN’T BECAUSE IT ISN’T EVEN AVAILABLE FOR PERCHES IN THE NORMAL SHOP, WHICH IS THE ONLY WAY TO OBTAIN EXCLUSIVE UNITS!!!!! Please fix this. Please make it so exclusive unit skins don’t show up in my personal shards shop when I don’t even own the unit. It just doesn’t make any sense of why they are available to me when I can’t even buy the skin in the first place because I don’t have the unit unlocked.

Devs obviously loved making it… but money

Sun Jan 22 2023 Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkol

I absolutely adore this game don’t get me wrong the characters all have their own little stuff going on. But at some point the game becomes extremely sad. Because you need to either put in a ridiculous amount of time into the game or you have to purchase characters to win levels that are just impossible to win without them. The devs obviously loved this game and put a lot of thought and love into this game but eventually money got in the way. It would be more fun if you just had to purchase the game outright and there not be any pay to win aspects of the game. The game overall is a good one but they should just make it 2 bucks and then keep their advertisements on social media. They are obviously passionate they keep updating it and adding new stuff but it would be more of a actual game if the money was just upfront rather than in the game. I’d be glad to pay 10 even 20 bucks for a game that is actually well thought out like this. I’ve played a lot of their games and they are always usually pretty good but this and dead ahead by far are the best. Just make us pay upfront and I think people would be happier! I hope a dev sees this one day just keep the good work up and make the game cost money upfront rather than later down the line!