Have now completed everything, campaign is a little lackluster, ends just as it's finding its footing.

TL:DR There are 2 ways to look at this game's release:

1: A direct continuation of the previous game and its systems, a noticeable improvement in many regards with equally noticeable steps back from SAS4.

2: The product of over a decade’s wait, in which the game delivers on being a sequel to the previous game, but leaves something to be desired as a standalone piece of art. Not a bad game, but it’s a modern title made by a mid-sized, well known company, it simply should not have a lot of the polish blindspots it has. Needed another year in development, extensive playtesting, and for the devs to get together and research similar titles by playing them as a team. It feels like NK can't break away from the design ethos of BTD6 and mobile gaming. It feels like a product.

Many players asked NK to delay this game during the summer demo, and they chose not to. There was much warning that this game WAS NOT READY, but it was released anyway. In some ways it mirrors the SAS4 steam port, down to the release month.

Starting w/ positives, most things gameplay are on par and often a step-up from previous titles. There are some balance and visual nitpicks, but in general things are better.

The movement feels less clunky and hacked-together than SAS4. You aren't punished for upgrading early. There is ZERO P2W, turrets and grenades are part of your kit and not consumables, the skill trees have had the fat cut and in its place, we got a lot of major improvements, including upgradeable abilities and pinnacle skills. You get XP for helping teammates with your skills, pretty baller.

There is now a real story, with a plotline you can follow. The way it's told is odd, there's a main character and an NPC character. The MC is voiced, and only refers to the squad as a squad of 2, despite this being a 4 player co op game.

Edit: Apparently there IS a female VA, her acting is a lot better for some reason. Paths are required to be mostly linear, as branching paths would necessitate more recorded dialogue.

Weapon handling has improved. No more eardrum destroying noise layering like in SAS4, servicable sounds. Weapons actually have recoil and bloom, I did occasionally need to tap the trigger for distant targets, which is cool. Recoil only affects bloom and not your crosshair, but it's something that the previous games lacked.

Now backpedal penalties are only applied while shooting, which makes the game feel smoother, and non-firing weapon movement penalties have been drastically reduced. Swapping to your pistol to run faster still exists, but it's not as prevalent, having trigger discipline is enough until the sprinters come out.

The ability to unlock equipment slots instead of being capped at 10 is cash money, but the level requirements for each upgrade is steep.

Onto the negative stuff. Mostly small things that could have easily been ironed out with better playtesting and polish standards. Lots of issues that a company of ~70 shouldn't have let slip through.

The fact that this game was rushed is written all over the walls. The soundscape's messy, poorly balanced, lacks details like sounds for grenade impacts, bullet casings, etc. Weapon sounds can be quite weak or placeholder. Only the nearest zombie to you makes footsteps, and footsteps sound the same across all zombie types. Zombie growls can be heard even when no zombies are around, from areas that you know are clear. Some sound effects are just MISSING, and there's a lot of choppy cutting in-and-out. Nobody on the audio team took the time to loop verses on the background music so you have it abruptly stop and start over from the beginning in a way that feels a bit grating after a while. Very flash-era, zero tension. Compare any mission audio here to Zombie Pods ambiance.

There's a lot of waiting around in Operations. You wait for caches to spawn, you wait for zombies to spawn. I miss when Cache was a time-attack that rewarded based on performance. Save The Merc, the only one that's mechanically distinct from the 3 other modes is almost always what people vote to play, with Extermination close behind. I was hoping we'd see NK get a little wild with the formula.

Writing and voice acting has a 'saturday morning cartoon' vibe, and occasionally feels like you're playing a game that's been translated. It's not a BAD story, but it needed to be looked over and refined with test audiences and a clearer vision .The general tone and atmosphere is a lot more cartoony / "well that happened" than previous games which were more grounded and gritty. I don't mind some color and humor but it's very jarring contrasted to the other entries. Only a handful of the jokes really landed. Imagine if Quincy from BTD6 used curse words, and you've got at least half of the lines in this game. Compare that to the jokes in SAS4, both in frequency and execution. Night and day difference.

The voice acting and writing starts to hit its stride later in the campaign, but it has many rough patches throughout. I don't blame the VAs or even the writers, but the vocal DIRECTION and the audio mixing do them no favors.

Small issues from the Summer demo persist, like wonky DPS calculations, especially on elemental guns and weapons with a lot of pierce. Some weak weapons did not receive a buff when they absolutely should have. Design language for archetypal weapons is inconsistent. I.E, flame weapons are all wildly different with no baselines to anchor them around.

Speaking of stats, for some reason damage isn't shown up front, you have to click "MORE" to view it in a big dropdown list. That's a very important stat to hide in a menu.

Lack of weapon impact is felt heavy. Painstates seem to be broken with some weapons and zombies, gore is hard to notice and often not consistent w/ weapon type or where you hit. Death animations are canned w/ no ragdoll or physics applied to emulate ragdolls. Gore pieces will roll on the ground and often clip through, sometimes going hyperspeed as gravity is infinitely applied while the bottom half tries to pull the top half through the ground. Gore and bodies disappear in seconds, but blood does stick around on most terrain.

Looting has been gutted. Loot that's here is just a circle, no models. No strongboxes,no HD ammo from zombies,no turret or grenade from zombies, no satisfying thunk from the non-existent crate drops. Major step down in the way the game loop feels as a result. A huge part of the fun of SAS4 is just gone. The density for turret/grenades is too low imho

Back to skills, while most of them are a big improvement, base run speed is still overemphasized like SAS4. Speed shouldn't be something that you can upgrade with skill points. Game should be balanced around the base speed. You are REQUIRED to max out your speed to have a real chance of dodging a lot of the AoEs in this game like boss AoEs,, enemy death AoEs etc. They are extremely unforgiving and in many cases can't be avoided without having high speed.

The game is well aware that it's got a number of cheap shots in it, so you're given 3 free, instant revives to trivialize the missions.

Medic gets benched a bit. Everyone can perform assisted revives in a HUGE radius, which is great! But these revives always bring you back at full health and take very little time to perform. The assisted revive skill for medic is a dead slot, only giving you a slight radius increase and damage boost while inside. I don't have to explain why requiring a squadmate to be dead for a small damage boost isn't ideal. Revive timer is gone too. If your squad leaves you, tough luck


There's more I want to talk about, positive and negative alike, but I'm running out of characters.

Overall, solid 6/10 game, 7/10 if you're used to how SAS played. Needed more time in the oven, but mostly functional as is.

this game looks and feels rather unfinished. If you care about getting your dollar's worth out of something I'd hold off on buying this game until it receives more updates

Keep in mind I'm only level 30 so I might of have not experienced something in this game yet, but I'm pretty confident I have experienced everything this game has to offer.

ZA:R vs SAS4
Pros
-Graphics. Game looks good.
-Gun mechanics. A lot of guns are more than click and shoot bullets in a straight line. There's a zappy heat seeking rifle that shoots bolts of energy. An LMG that shoots out more bullets the longer you fire it. A pistol that uses more ammo in a charged shot to deal maximum damage.
-Vendors. You can buy guns, gear, crafting materials, mods.
-More in-depth support system. Variety of turrets and grenades. You always have 2 turrets and 3 grenades at the start of a game now, no longer requiring to be bought or picked up.

Meh:
-They exchanged augments for mods. No idea why they did this. Why not have both? The more systems of progression, the better.

Cons:
-Gameplay. Bullets are unresponsive, especially on shotguns.
-Sense of progression. You don't get "skill" points every level. Instead, you get either a core (passive), skill (active), or specialty (subclass) point in that order. In SAS4, you got a "skill" point always, which you could allocate to either passive, or active abilities. This is made worse from the fact that for the first 20 levels, since you don't have your specialty unlocked, you don't get upgrade point, making every 3rd level until level 20 feel useless.
Speaking of passive skills, ZA:R only has 6. SAS4 has double that number, at 12. To make things worse, you can only upgrade a skill up to a max of 5 times. In SAS4, it was 25. This has shortened the sense of progression in ZA:R. The low number of passives along with the reduced passive level just overall reduces the amount of build variety a player can have.
Another point of sense of progression being reduced are the drops. Since guns and gear are limited by a minimum rarity (at least from what I can tell), it feels like you are getting the same stuff over and over again, which you are.
-The specialty (subclass) system also sucks. In this game, you kill or be killed. 95% of players chose the specialty with more damage, why? because kills net you more XP, and XP nets you a sense of progression that is already sorely lacking in this game. Why would I want to support someone else to kill the zombie, when I can kill the zombie instead? Why would I want to tank the zombie, when I can kill it instead? Medics don't even use their biocleanse bomb to heal the party, instead, they - guess what? - use it to kill zombies.
-Lack of game systems and content. A lot of people recommending this game are hoping for events, black weapons, and all that good stuff that was implemented in SAS4 after it's launch. IT SHOULD BE IN THE GAME ALREADY! IT WAS IN SAS4, WHY ISN'T IT IN ZA:R AT LAUNCH?! Why are so many systems that were beloved in SAS4 not in ZA:R? This just makes it seem like the game was rushed out. It should've stayed in the oven for a couple more months to earn this $15 price.
-Bosses. The bosses don't fit the theme of the game at all. There's a space rock guy, an ice guy, a zappy guy, a void necromancer guy, and then finally, the regurgitator that we all know and love. Only the regurgitator fits this game. Where's the necrosis or the devastator? Plus, the bosses are weak and useless and you can curb stomp them. And then, 0-100, the regurgitator begins to literally one-shot you with the worms from his gullet and the game feels cheap.
-There are no zombie modifiers except for energy, fire, and corrosion resistance. Where's the wall phasing dark minion bloater at? Where's the extra fast runners that sprint like track stars? Where's the extra strong and berserk stalker that chunks you? Zombies feel boring. Instead of making them interesting and dangerous, they just made them more bullet spongy.
-Bugs. This game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ buggy. Loading screens randomly flash white, giving me epileptic seizures. Zombies are stuck in walls softlocking the game, because you can't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ progress the map because you need to kill all of them. Doors randomly don't open, so that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ locks you out. This game is utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Actual ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cash grab piece of ♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.

TLDR- ZA:R is a step backwards from SAS4. Systems in SAS4 are simply not in this game, i.e events, nightmarish. Sense of progression is bad and the game feels shallow with the design and gameplay decisions. There is good in ZA;R, but there is just so much more meh, bad, and why? This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Don't waste your money. Wait until content is updated into the game unless you want to mindlessly grind your life away in this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.