World Zombination's factions fight with very different strategies

Proletariat's upcoming faction-based strategy game for iOS and Android tablets, World Zombination, lets players choose to play as the zombie or human factions, both of which utilize very different strategies to win over cities.

Set in a massively-multiplayer online world where players can form guilds and go on asynchronous raid-like battles together, the game lets players choose which faction they wish to play as.

If players choose the zombie faction, they will have hundreds of zombies at their disposal, which they can mutate into different zombie types. In a demo of the game shown to Polygon, the zombie faction spawned more than 100 zombies in one go. Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak told Polygon that up to 500 zombies can appear on the screen at once.

When they first spawn, the majority of the zombies will be drones — weak, disposable zombies that are good at killing civilians and breaking through smaller walls, but struggle against human gunfire and high barriers. These drones act as the player's resource pool. From this pool of drones, players can mutate clusters of zombies into more advance types that can perform different functions.

In the demo we played, we were able to create Runners (fast-moving zombies that can close distances quickly, but do not have many hit-points), Spitters (slower-moving zombies that can spit toxic sludge over barricades) and Brutes, which sound exactly like what they are. Before heading into a battle, players can choose how many and what kind of zombies they wish to bring with them. Once they're in the city, it's a matter of strategically maneuvering the zombies around the map and assigning the right type of zombie to specific targets.

On the human faction, players won't have as many units at their disposal, but that's because the humans "play smarter" than the zombies, according to Sivak. The humans also have different class types like snipers, medics, brawlers who carry chainsaws and gun firers. Unlike the zombies, the humans can be healed. Rather than overwhelming the opposition with sheer numbers, the human faction relies on a different kind of strategic play, such as positioning snipers in the right place and having the medics stay behind the gun firers who stand behind the brawlers.

According to Sivak, the cities are constantly changing, and these changes function like "events" that happen in many mobile games.

"Some cities are rare, so Honolulu for example only comes up every six weeks, but it has really rare rewards," Sivak told Polygon. "Paris and Moscow and other very big cities are almost always available."

Sivak likes to think of the asynchronous multiplayer as "co-ordinated play." So instead of having all guild members online at the same time, players within that guild can hit a city within a window of time, and their achievements will be shared with their team.

Sivak announced last week that World Zombination will launch on iOS and Android devices first before coming to Windows PC and Mac. Its beta is expected to begin early next year.