[b]Great horde shooter - but this thumbs-up comes with a pretty big asterisk[/b]
If Steam asked me whether I feel positive or negative about World War Z: Aftermath, my actual answer would be mixed.
Unfortunately, Steam doesn't give me that option. And compared to the amount of genuinely bad games on this platform, giving World War Z a negative review simply wouldn't feel fair.
So: [b]Recommended, but with reservations.[/b]
For some context, I didn't buy this game because I wanted to play online with random people. I bought it to enjoy the co-op campaign with a friend, and that's what this review is based on.
[h3]The good stuff[/h3]
World War Z has aged surprisingly well.
The original game released in 2019, and in 2026 it still looks fantastic. I'm playing on a 49" ultrawide monitor, and some of the large-scale horde sequences are genuinely impressive. Watching hundreds of zombies pour over walls, climb on top of each other and flood into a defensive position still looks great today, and the game already shows this off in the very first chapter.
The core gameplay is also extremely easy to understand.
Move from objective to objective, collect supplies, prepare your defenses, wait for the horde and then kill absolutely everything.
That's basically the game. And honestly? It works.
It becomes considerably more interesting once you've leveled a few classes and start coordinating builds with your teammates. With the right group of friends, defending a position against a massive swarm can be a lot of fun.
[h3]Unfortunately, the difficulty balance is pretty strange[/h3]
Depending on your skill level, it doesn't take very long before difficulties 1–3 become far too easy, while 4 and 5 suddenly feel brutally unforgiving.
My friend was practically yawning from the beginning. I reached that point somewhere around our second day playing on Normal. So naturally, we moved on to the harder difficulties.
And that's where the game goes from "a little too easy" to "who hurt the developers?"
Enemies deal huge amounts of damage, supplies become scarce and healing is limited. Yes, you can optimize your classes, perks and team composition, and that definitely helps — but the jump in difficulty still feels disproportionate. There isn't really a comfortable middle ground. What I'd normally expect from a difficulty called "Normal" simply doesn't exist here.
[h3]The bots are basically walking revive kits[/h3]
The AI companions aren't completely useless.
They are very good at one thing: Picking you up after you die. That's about it.
Their actual combat effectiveness often feels questionable, and when things get chaotic you frequently end up risking your own health trying to save teammates while the bots contribute very little.
Want to do it sneaky beaky like?
Good luck with that unless you're playing without bots. They have an impressive talent for shooting things that explode, trigger alarms or otherwise ruin your attempt at staying quiet. At that point your carefully planned stealth section turns into another sprint for survival while you desperately try to preserve enough health for the giant horde waiting at the end of the mission.
[h3]And then there are the bugs...[/h3]
This is where my patience starts running out.
Saber Interactive isn't exactly some tiny indie studio, and after this many years I would have expected some of these issues to be fixed.
- Your selected character resets every time back in the main lobby, forcing you to select them again.
- Teammates occasionally become invisible.
- Spectator mode doesn't always work correctly.
-Sometimes players don't even spawn properly inside safe zones.
None of these things completely destroy the game on their own, but together they become increasingly irritating, especially when you're already replaying a difficult mission for the fiftieth time.
[h3]The progression system is a grind[/h3]
Pretty much everything costs in-game currency.
Skills. Weapon upgrades. Perks. More upgrades. More perks.
And you earn that currency slowly enough that unlocking everything requires a significant amount of repetition.
There are daily and weekly challenges that are clearly intended to increase replayability, but personally I don't feel much motivation to keep repeating content just to finance another round of upgrades.
The online experience with random teammates doesn't really appeal to me either. I don't have any experience with it, but from what I've read: As soon as you're matched with very experienced players who know every spawn point, every shortcut, and every objective, they can basically complete half the level on their own while you lag behind, trying to keep up.
At that point, I'm not sure who is actually having fun.
[h3]So why am I still recommending it?[/h3]
Because despite everything I just complained about...
[b]World War Z can still be a damn good co-op game.[/b]
The huge hordes are spectacular, the gunplay feels satisfying, the environments look great and defending a position together with friends can be genuinely entertaining.
Other zombie shooters have handled progression, bots, difficulty scaling and various gameplay systems much better. But if you want modern-looking environments, enormous zombie swarms and a straightforward co-op shooter to play with friends, World War Z still occupies a surprisingly comfortable niche in 2026. Apparently nobody has come along and completely replaced it yet.
So yes, this review sounds much more negative than the thumbs-up underneath it would suggest.
That's intentional. My real rating is somewhere in the middle.
Play it with the right friends, accept that the balancing can be weird, prepare for some grinding and bring a decent amount of patience once you reach the higher difficulties.
If you're okay with that, there's a lot of fun to be had here.
