Explainer

Why zombies suit a tactics game

A zombie cannot flank, cannot shoot and cannot be reasoned with, which sounds like a worse enemy and is often a better one. What it changes is not the story but the arithmetic of a fight.

Zombies are the most reused enemy in games and the easiest thing to be sniffy about. They are also, for reasons that have nothing to do with horror, unusually well suited to a game about moving a small group of people around a map.

This page is about the trade. What a zombie gives a tactics designer, what it takes away, and which games have managed to get more of the first than the second.

Where the modern zombie comes from, and why it is free

The word comes from Haitian belief, where a zombie is a corpse raised and controlled by someone else, and the early films used it that way. The thing in games is not that. It comes from Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), which invented the version everyone now means: a crowd of the recently dead, no master, no motive, spreading by bite.

The film does not use the word zombie once. The characters call them ghouls. Romero said later that he had not thought of them as zombies at all, and the label was attached by other people afterwards.

There is a practical reason the industry is full of them. The film is in the public domain, and not on purpose. Under the copyright law of the time a film needed a notice on the print to be protected. The original title was Night of the Flesh Eaters, the distributor changed it to Night of the Living Dead, and the copyright notice went out with the old title card. Nobody noticed in time. The most influential horror film of its century lost its protection through a typesetting mistake, which is why anyone can make a zombie anything without clearing a licence, and why so many have.

What a zombie gives a tactics game

Every item on this list is a mechanical property, not a mood.

It arrives as a crowd. One of anything is a dice roll; thirty of something slow is a shape on the map you have to plan around.
It is slow, which makes ground the resource. A fast enemy punishes reaction time. A slow one punishes bad positioning, and bad positioning is a decision you can be shown.
It fights in melee, which turns distance into ammunition and ammunition into time.
It comes to noise. That gives every loud solution a cost and makes a silent one worth learning.
It does not negotiate, so the designer never has to write a reason. A faction needs motives. A horde needs a direction.
It is cheap to run. Simple behaviour means you can put a hundred on screen, and a hundred of anything changes the kind of problem a fight is.
It makes mistakes compound. One bite becomes a wounded soldier, which becomes a slower squad, which becomes a second bite. Attrition is the most natural difficulty curve there is.

What it takes away

The cost is real and it is always the same: a horde cannot play against you. It has no tactics to counter, nothing to outwit, no decision of its own that you can anticipate and punish. After a few hours the crowd stops being an opponent and becomes weather.

It also removes the best thing a post-apocalyptic game has, which is an enemy who can argue for itself. The first two Fallout games are frightening because the Enclave has a position and can state it in clean uniforms. A zombie has nothing to say, and a game made only of zombies has nobody to disagree with.

This is why nearly every good zombie tactics game puts people back in. Raiders, militias, other survivors, the group down the road with the fuel you need. The dead set the pace of a map. The living are what the game is about.

The games that got the trade right

Dead State (DoubleBear Productions and Iron Tower Studio, 2014) is the clearest case. A small Texas town, a shelter of survivors to keep fed, turn-based fights outside, and noise as the thing that kills you. Its best decision is that the other survivors are a bigger problem than the dead, and that food and morale are the real campaign.

Urban Strife (White Pond Games, published by MicroProse) is the most direct modern attempt at squad tactics with action points in a zombie apocalypse. Its hordes move around the map on their own rather than waiting in rooms, which makes a loud fight at one end of a town a problem at the other. It went into early access on 10 December 2024 and reached 1.0 on 14 July 2026.

They Are Billions (Numantian Games, 2019) proves the attrition point at the other scale: a colony, real time with a pause you will use constantly, and a single infected that gets through the wall turning into a lost game twenty minutes later. The Last Spell (Ishtar Games, published by The Arcade Crew, 2023) keeps only the siege, building by day and holding walls by night with heroes who do not come back. Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville (Northway Games, 2015) takes a city back block by block and spends most of its attention on rival factions.

Two outside the genre are worth studying anyway. Left 4 Dead (Valve, 2008) built an AI Director that watches the players and places the next crowd where it will hurt, which is the best argument anyone has made that a horde should be paced rather than placed. Project Zomboid (The Indie Stone, Steam early access from November 2013) is not a tactics game, but no other game is as honest about the arithmetic: you will die, the question is what you got done first.

The cliche problem is real

The objection stands. There are more zombie games than anyone wanted and most of them use the dead as set dressing, because it is the cheapest way to fill a world with things to shoot without explaining anything.

What separates the ones worth playing is not the fiction, which is always the same, but whether the dead actually change how a fight works. If you could replace every zombie with a slightly slow bandit and the game would play the same, the zombies were decoration. If taking out the horde mechanics would break the economy of ammunition, noise and ground, they were doing the work.

Where this leaves RAD Tactics

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished.

What we will say is that the factions are not an afterthought beside the dead. A horde sets the clock and the ground. People are what you end up arguing with.