Masked Forces: Zombie Survival

Introduction

Masked Forces: Zombie Survival is the black sheep of Nightbinder's Masked Forces series — three low-budget PvP shooters built around masked, faceless combatants — reworked into a co-operative wave-survival spin-off. It arrived on Steam on 14 July 2017, priced at NZ$7.45, published by My Way Games alongside the developer's other entries in the same asset family (Masked Forces, Masked Forces 2: Mystic Demons and Masked Forces 3). The pitch hasn't changed since launch: buy weapons and armour between rounds, hold ground against zombies that come in escalating waves, and do it solo, in PvP, or in online co-op.

Gameplay and combat

The loop is as plain as budget wave shooters get: earn currency for surviving and killing, spend it at an in-game shop on better weapons and armour, then face a harder wave. Steam's own store description frames the difficulty curve directly — "their level of power does increase with each wave" — and player reviews back that up without much elaboration needed, because there isn't much more to the design than that.

What separates Masked Forces: Zombie Survival from being purely disposable is that several long-time reviewers, including some who otherwise pan the presentation, single out the shooting itself as more competent than the trailer suggests. One review calls it "fun" outright despite rating the graphics, sound and map variety poorly in the same breath; another, after criticising the physics, still credits it with "simple shooting action that is at least functional." That's a low bar, but it's one the game clears — the jank sits in the edges of the experience (movement, hit detection, a reported need to jump to clear kerbs) rather than in the act of aiming and firing itself.

Visuals and sound

This is where the review corpus agrees almost unanimously, regardless of overall verdict: the presentation is rough. The masked, low-poly character models are shared across the wider Masked Forces series rather than built for this specific premise, so the zombies read as a reskin of existing PvP-shooter assets rather than anything designed from scratch for a horror-survival game. Sound design draws the most consistent criticism in the whole sample — multiple reviewers, independently, describe the zombie noises and gunfire as actively unpleasant rather than merely dated, and it's one of the few points where positive and negative reviews use almost identical language to describe the same problem.

Multiplayer and community

The store page's headline features are Online PvP and Online Co-op, sitting alongside single-player survival as the game's three advertised modes. In 2026, that's the part of the pitch to be most sceptical of: Steam's live concurrent-player endpoint for this app currently reports zero players online. A handful of 2023-era reviews still describe multiplayer sessions working with genuinely low latency, so the netcode itself isn't the problem — there is simply very little reason to expect anyone else to be in a lobby with you nine years after launch. Anyone buying this today should plan around the single-player wave mode and treat PvP or co-op as a pleasant surprise if it happens, not a mode to buy for.

Progression, shop and achievements

Between-wave shopping for weapons and armour is the game's only real progression system, and it's thin by design — there's no skill tree or build variety beyond what you can afford to buy. Where the game earns its keep is achievements: Steam's global stats for this title show an unusually forgiving completion curve for a 10-achievement list, with 96.3% of players unlocking "First Blood," 78.7% reaching "50 Kills," and a genuinely high 41.1% still getting all the way to "600 Kills," the hardest achievement in the list. One Steam review recommends the game explicitly as an "easy, fast & cheap 100% Steam Achievements" title and links a completion guide — a fair description of what a meaningful slice of this game's current audience is actually here for.

Value

At its NZ$7.45 list price this is an easy game to overpay for; several reviewers explicitly frame their purchase in terms of loose change (70p, £1.07, US$0.99), which is the price band the game is realistically worth and the one it's regularly discounted down to. Treated as a five-minute distraction or an achievement-completion exercise rather than a full-priced purchase, the maths works out fine. Treated as a real multiplayer zombie shooter at list price, it doesn't.

Final verdict

Masked Forces: Zombie Survival is a budget spin-off doing exactly what its Masked Forces siblings do, pointed at a different target: a functional but unremarkable wave-shooting loop, wrapped in presentation nobody involved seems especially proud of, sold cheaply enough that its own audience mostly agrees the price is fair. The shooting works, the achievements are generous, and the multiplayer modes the store page leads with are, by Steam's own current numbers, effectively empty. Buy it on a deep sale for the single-player loop and the achievement list, not for the PvP or co-op the listing still advertises.