Bought the game because moderate fan of the Infectonator and Necronator game series, plenty of hours sunk into those in the past, figured a PC release would have been a drastic improvement with many new features, especially for the price, but as it turns out there's pretty much no improvements - indeed, some downgrades - over the free flash versions you can find all around the net.

Game needs some serious polish, including additional difficulties, ability to pause mid-game, a much bigger amount of maps with greater variety - it's terrible that unlike the older titles, you can't pick what cities you attack but instead get handed a random city name from the country you're infecting but the same map several times over. The game is a massive grind, the first hour is fun and unique, and after that its all the same experience over and over again. You conquer one region, and that's the game - the rest is just the same thing bundled another 20+ times. The difficulty scale ramps up something awful once panic decides it is going to hit two thresholds, also.

Another frustrating feature is the terrible zombie AI. It seems like a common thing in every map, there will be one corner usually off screen or hidden behind the UI, or one guy in a tiny 1x1 square room with a closed door not moving, not speaking, not doing anything at all, your zombies will wander aimlessly never detecting him until it is too late or pathing into the area. I get that zombies are zombies and thus aimless automatons, but they should be able to notice a guy taking selfies repeatedly forever on the other side of the street.

There's no unique units or events or anything relating to specific continents either - you might run across some tribal guys in Australia or some eskimo tier citizens in Alaska, but other than that, there's nothing to make the game look less than the boring padded out grind it is. You won't find Navy Seals taking on your zombinos in America, you won't meet SAS in the UK, and there's no Spetsnaz in Russia either - it's just the same copied and pasted pixel art sprits running around forever. Every single one of your zombies looks the same, as well. I recall a nudist beach, part of one of the boss battles (which, incidentally, are also all the same just with different sprites) with a bunch of naked civilians running around, yet when they got infected and turned, the zombie that rose up magically had the same blue shirt and orange jeans on as everything else. Very sad indeed.

I've only got 5 hours into it, and that's all I need to see. Another 5 hours and I'd have all the achievements unlocked, and would have seen every zombie (also pretty much the same, except for a few oddities I.E this one explodes on death, this one heals itself when damaging enemies, this one moves slower but has more health etc etc). The padding in the game is immense - one run got me from level 1 to level 3. The final "mutator" tier bonuses you can activate are at level 15 - but you don't just get them automatically for reaching the level oh no, you have to spend a token you get from levelling up as well to enable them! Assuming the XP growth is exponential, you'll soon be looking at going over the same game countless times doing the same boring stuff for pretty much less reward each time. Some of the "mutators" should have been in the game from the start as an upgrade - they're basically taken from the flash game as upgrades instead - and offered to you as incentive to keep playing the damn game. It's stupid.

The game suffers from so many pointless design choices. For example, there's seemingly no reason for "the cure" to exist at all. They pop up as punishment for not regularly getting "PERFECT" on missions thus letting panic rise out of control, and then just randomly add points each day to a 0/1000 count. Depending on where and when they crop up, other events could see them nuked out of existence instantly, have them get wiped out because the region they spawned in was the one you've just eliminated, or appear on the other side of the world forcing you to play through several tens of boring "tutorial" grade invasions just to reach them. Not sure why they're even in the game in the first place, they didn't do much to hinder my progress other than forcing me to abandon regions I was steadily cleaning to go after them. Why aren't there ZIT HQ's and CDC offices that crop up that you could attack to disable the boring repetitive assaults on every map after the first hour of gameplay? Would certainly make the game more playable.

Another pointless hit of what honestly feels like more padding and fake difficulty, is the fact your abilities come with a 2 second cooldown. Early on it's not so bad, but later on your zombies will get murdered immediately, and all you can do is feed kills to the humans because you can't spawn your stuff fast enough. Example - a good combo is placing a burger to lure humans in, and then dropping either a goo jar, or a canister shell to infect the group - but with the cooldown in effect, especially late game, any zombie swarms you try to build up are just killed instantly. I found some small success in spawning a bunch of zombies in a closed building then opening the door to let them flood out that way, but even then the AI would often let me down.

It honestly feels like the game comes down to luck a lot of the time - if your zombies mutate into better, stronger versions, and then also hoping you're lucky enough to get an actually useful mutant instead of the other large amount of trash filler and often weaker versions. It's obvious the developers decided that copying and pasting the same sprite and zombie would make the game look more fleshed out, but it's honestly sad. You get a big muscly zombie, the Brute. There's also the Biker, another brute type. Then the Berserker. Also a Soldier. They're all functionally the same, but pretty much direct upgrades to each other - making the previous one pretty much defunct once unlocked. Rather than have +5 versions of every zombie, you're really looking at maybe 5 zombies full stop, but seperated into their own zombie type as opposed to being "upgraded" as time goes on like they should have been.

Another gripe, is the fact it feels like Youtube or Twitch trash. There's memes piled upon memes, so much so that there's a major bleedout of creativity, it feels like they couldn't be bothered coming up with anything new, they just took an old flash game, stuffed it full of memes (Drumpf as a zombie, really?) and made some bad fan-art of popular images around the web - I'm not a memelord by any means, but I recognised most of the pictures if not the name of them, such as the running fat girl, the walking cop pepper-spraying a random guy, and the soldier blowing up bubble gum etc. Not to mention having eggplant and marrow versions of Xenomorphs, and Justin Beaver etc. I honestly didn't realise you could stack crap so high. The previous games had some mild pop culture references, such as Michael Jackson singing Thriller as a zombie (made sense, I guess) but this game takes the cake. I guess it's aimed at 10 year olds or something, and people who produce content aimed at milking said 10 year olds for views and ad revenue.

Or maybe I'm just a humourless prick, who knows?

I think what capped it off for me was the inclusion of Donald Trump, under the psuedonym Drumpf, who when unlocked as a zombie, has absolutely no value and does nothing. At that point I realised just how shallow it all is. Kinda insulting, really.

tl;dr game is a mess, probably won't be fixed enough to make it playable or long lasting. Consider it meme Youtube trash that is better to watch than play yourself.

Too long, too grindy, you need to take specific paths to win otherwise you waste hours just to reset the playtrough, not fun, no freedom of play. Previous Infectonator games you could make mistakes and still get back winning, here you can't, if you make mistakes you waste entire 1-3 hours of run.

The game feels like a mobile game without the actual notion of a popup telling you to spent money on some sort of currency with the game. While that is a good thing the Issue I have with the game is that basically that same difficulty is still present and you feel like you need a little something to actualy boost yourself to keep up with the ever increasing rampant difficulty. It's like they were going to have microtransactions and then removed them without realizing how much that would affect the difficulty of the game. It's really weird but i'll explain.

This is due in part because the more you infect an area of the map the more the world panics and basically starts ramping up on weapons and basically the people's ability to kill you. You can't just keep infecting the same area you basically have to spread to other countires and take on the less panicked areas. Which begins to get old because that's too easy. The other issue with this is that while you may thinks it's a form of grinding, it's not because the best way to get money (which is how how level your overall zombies stats) is by doing these random tasks such as using a burger and killing 5 people. Which isn't fun because it forces you to use a method you don't normally use and you're only doing to get money to level. That and the fact it's random objectives doesn't help at all. It should have been made in a way that is a bonus but not necessary to accomplish. You may not think you have to but you will in order to actually get money to upgrade otherwise the challenge won't go away and gets worse actually because of your fail attempts on an area and that world panics more.

Sure you can level up zombies after a certain point but that in of itself is basically holding on to any zombies you may have collected to use as a sort of currency to either upgrade them or craft other zombies. Frankly I just used common zombies and 3 "unique" zombies (you always have them in inventory but can spawn just once.) and focused on my infection rate stat and mutation stat because I couldn't be bothered to stack other non unique zombies in my inventory because it was too damn costly just to use them and watch them die or not be needed at all by the time the stage was completed.

Your're also under enormous pressure because the more you induce panic the more the world researches a cure and it's (I assume) game over. In order to actually get to these labs or halt them you have to totally infect that area and that is not simple when you have armed civilians, cops, and military in one spot with a density of about 60 or people. Good luck. As when it reaches that point you have dug yourself in a grave and you cannot get out until you go back to low level areas and wreck them and as I said previously, that gets old very fast.

I thought the game had a lot of charm to it and the music was enjoyable, I just think the game is too hard and the challenge is always ramping even if you're not ready for it. For some that may not have that much of an issue with it but for me personally it just got too frustrating. Hell I think there is even a unique zombie you get for totally infecting an area
or it was a boss. I'm guessing it was probably the former. I couldn't deal with the limitations and constant difficulty because it never felt like I was making progress. Sort of like when you play a game and you level but the enemies level with you, that's the feeling I got which makes to where you feel like what's the point of progressing if they do just as much?

Overall I wouldn't recommend this game for the reasons stated above if you want to give it a go by all means. You should be able to tell if you'll like this game in i'd say a half hour or so. If it doesn't click by then it probably won't.

A bit of a miss. A lot of what makes Infectonator great is still here, but this one focuses on long-term strategic play and I think it takes away from the enjoyment of the game. A single game goes on for what feels like forever. It does well distinguishing itself from previous entries, but I think I'd rather revisit those instead.

I really liked the previous game, and actually really enjoyed the game for a couple of hours, evolving your zombies, spreading the disease and unlocking new traits.

But then, the game turned into a mindblowingly boring grind-fest, where each level is more or less just a question of spamming utility items and crossing your fingers for a lucky spawn.

It doesn't feel like you have much control when you enter the endgame (after destroying your first continent, I would say), and there are so .. many .. regions to destroy before you win the game.

The game simply got way to repetitive, and I gave up on completing it, simply because it was the same thing you do again and again.

Fun for a couple hours, but unless you enjoy grindfests, I would stay away.

Wish I could get a refund, but I've already played two hours.

If I could give any review material on it, it's that the difficulty spike goes from easy to insane in less than a few invasions. No, the police force doesn't upgrade slowly, they go from one or two cops with pistols in a small area, to a few cops with pistols. Then after you invade a couple more times, swat teams that take very little damage and are equipped with shotguns, so if you do get a hit off, your zombies die in one or two hits and very quickly. You also only get five seconds to get another zombie down or kill the rest with grenades if all of your zombies die off. A cool mechanic, but not when all zombies die as soon as spawned.

At this point it's nearly impossible to complete a level without help from grenades, and then it throws in hazmats with smgs that kill your zombies quickly.

So in short, the it goes from a chill game, straight to five swat guys with shotguns in one room that obliterate your zombies.

I loved the old games but this is a bit much for me.

Look at the play time on other reviews.

It was fun for all 8 hours I played it, and that's pretty much all the play time I can take.
Its to repetitive, simple, and narrow for the price point. If you have the money to spare, maybe you have played the other Infectonator games. Sure it was fun. Its just more of a 5 dollar game for my expectations.

Very overpriced casual game with no meaningful improvements over free versions available on Flash sites.

I've played Infectonator: World Dominator, which is a classic flash game online that mirrors exactly what you're doing in Infectonator 3. I absolutely loved the hell out of IWD, it was simple and yeah it might've been repetitious at times. But it was the kind of repetition where you just want to keep coming back until the city of the continent of a country got infected. Which was primarily what I did and the challenge it gave you was through how you spread the infection and placed the special zombies. Those special zombies, to name a few, Michael Jackson, Venom, Colonel Sanders, Ronald McDonald .etc all out to infect people including their healthy counterparts.

You could upgrade your virus, buy special items, upgrade your zombies and still keep chucking them until the world is zombie infested. Simple fun.

Infectonator 3 while it looks great and the music is still awesome, seems to have lost some of that simplicity. World Dominator was, again, repetitious but it kept you wanting to chip at it. In this game, however, bringing in a small craft system and fighting against a curing system (even in casual mode with no cure) on top of that repetitious system. Then you got yourself a grinder game, which it pains me to see this game as. But I could feel the grind hours away from my time playing this game and I just found myself shaking my head at that.

I felt that what could've been done for Infectonator 3, is to split the game into two halves. One half is the game that is entirely new and wants to introduce the new system to new and old players. While the other half, could've taken the same reigns of World Dominator and replicate that mode of playing for old players and new players who don't want to put up with that grinding system. Even in Casual Mode, which takes away the capability of a cure being developed, you still get the grind looming over you in other ways.

You couldn't even go to specific cities, you're restricted to continents this time which is a little bit of a downer. I've already spoiled myself a little by seeing all of the zombies you could unlock and I love the nods that they brought into this game, particularly Jason Voorhees which fits nicely with this game. Of all zombies to bring in, not even WD had him!

While the novelty factor of this game was glorious, I came to this game expecting the same levels of mayhem I could unleash in World Dominator, all in this nice upgraded fashion. I even wondered if I can't see this game perform at 5FPS like WD did when you manage to maximize the speed of the zombies in that game, lol. Pro tip - don't max the speed too much.

I'm torn with this game, I really am though. But for all intents and purposes, I could only see myself putting this game down and probably not touching it again after a long grind session. So I'll spare myself from that and take a pass. It's really a shame that this game took the direction it did when it's free game predecessor got the concept down perfectly.

Intro credit video of ''Toge games'' is so eardrum ripping loud, it will destroy your speakers. Wtf.