This one hurts. Ninja Kiwi has forgotten what made SAS Zombie Assault great. And reminds me a lot of what's happening with the Killing Floor Franchise.

Quick point is it lost it's soul and passion and now feels extremely lifeless despite having more in depth game play mechanics and "better" graphics, exactly like Killing Floor. The biggest and indisputable improvement is the gore, bodies and blood don't de-spawn and look better when the explode, but the animations for when they die feel a bit lamer they usually just fall over or chunks of meat fly everywhere instead of their limbs getting blown off their torso or just getting shot in half.

On the surface, it's still fun for a bit, but there's huge problems like bugs and kind of a dead end in terms of number of maps to play. SAS 3 felt good because there was one mode, just a about 15 minutes worth of fighting zombies with a crew and trying to not get cornered, and then you upgrade your gear and do it again. All of these new maps are objective based, which shouldn't be a bad thing, but is. Your basic game play option is to just replay these 8 objective maps over and over until you unlock a couple other modes including a classic survival type feel. And again, this would be just fine, but where this falls short is in SAS 3 you had like 15 maps with the promise of more but SAS 4 I assume was even more profitable, and yet has even fewer maps, half of which just look like generic sci fi panels and concrete. None of those grimy filthy decayed farmhouses, castles, parking garages and hospitals to be seen here. Even with all these new weapons, armor, perks and upgrades, I still feel less inclined to play because the environments I'm going to be playing in just aren't as visually engaging or appealing. What's more, is the absurd amount of bugs I've encountered in more short playtime, years after release. namely audio bugs with pops and pauses in ambient tracks, player firearms are wayyyyyy too loud to the point where one guys gun halfway across the map is all you can hear with no way to adjust this, and huge fps drops in multiplayer as some sort of latency consistency type of mechanic so that no one goes out of sink. So it doesn't matter how much you pay for internet, your multiplayer is at the mercy of the weakest link. Which is how it should be, just in a teamwork and game play sense and not a technical issue sense. I do not remember this being an issue on mobile closer to when the game came out. You could say "hey, it's an old game, you can't expect them to keep updating it for free!" which is a valid point of view that is disqualified by the fact of how easy they make it to blow a couple hundred dollars to skip progression.

Just because of how crazy this coincidence is, I'm gonna go down the striking similarities between KF and SAS real quick.

SAS Zombie Assault and Killing Floor are both-

A team based zombie killing co-op game with a focus on it's extremely addicting and satisfying game play loop even though it's very basic and straightforward in it's design.

A game that started pretty rough around the edges in it's inception and didn't really take off into what we know it as today until a big publisher gave them the funding they needed.

A game that had a really strong dark survival horror atmosphere in it's early installments and a gritty art style in it's world and enemies based off of the work the original team created, that was almost completely cast aside by this new publisher in favor for a super generic sci fi theme for it's latest installments in order to "reach a wider audience" and in turn abandoning the look and feel that made the game so appealing and thus the people who supported them. The gore blood and gore however, was improved, and looks pretty great, it just would've been better if they had just applied that improvement to the old graphics.

And a game that is wrought with predatory micro transactions.

its good 4 player fun with randoms or friends the heavy is a fun class,dont hesitate on buying improved ammo for your guns.

pretty good