Zombie Army 4: Dead War opens in Milan, and the city is already lost. The dead have pushed the Allies out of Germany and back into France and Italy. The Hellmouth that Adolf Hitler opened has closed without ending the threat.
Rebellion Developments built this third-person shooter as a sequel to the 2015 compilation Zombie Army Trilogy and a spin-off of Sniper Elite. It released on 4 February 2020 for PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One, on 1 May 2020 for Google Stadia, and on 26 April 2022 for the Nintendo Switch. It is a game about shooting a great many things that are already dead, and it is better at that than it has any right to be.
Milan, 1946
The premise is set in 1946, one year after the Resistance defeated Hitler and banished him to hell rather than killing him. The dead kept coming anyway. Without a leader, most of the living dead are weak and easy to destroy when their numbers stay low, but rumors spread about a cult holding the horde together, and the surviving world has started calling the conflict the Dead War. That is a clean setup for a co-op shooter: a war that never ended, an enemy that never stops, and a map that runs from Milan to Venice, Sardinia, Croatia, Naples and finally Rome.
What the campaign does with that setup is more interesting than the premise suggests. Early on, the dead start showing intelligence — enough to pick up handguns and SMGs, though not enough to use them as well as a living soldier would. That single change does more for the game than any new weapon. A zombie with a pistol is still a bad shot, but it forces you to move, and movement is where Zombie Army 4: Dead War is at its best.
The horde learns to hold a gun
The enemy roster widens as the campaign pushes deeper into Italy. More dangerous versions of the foes from the original game appear with new looks and new powers, alongside deadlier enemies that read as a mix of demonic mutants and vengeful spirits. Then come the vehicles: hellish versions of destroyed German armor, abominations fueled by flesh and magic. Rebellion is not subtle about any of this, and it should not be. The game is built for four players, and a four-player squad needs targets that justify four players.
Hitler’s hordes are back for more in this spine-chilling shooter from the makers of Sniper Elite 4!
That line, from the publisher’s own description of the game, tells you exactly what Zombie Army 4: Dead War is selling. Abominable occult enemies, epic weapons and a harrowing new campaign for one to four players, set in 1940s Europe, with humankind fighting to survive an undead armageddon. The game delivers on that promise without much interest in doing anything else.
Venice, Sardinia, Croatia, Naples, Rome
The structure is a tour. The protagonists fight through survivor brigade locations in Venice, Sardinia, Croatia, Naples and finally Rome, retreating deeper into Italy as the dead get worse. It is a good excuse to keep the scenery changing, and the settings do a lot of the work that the plot does not. A canal city, an island, a stretch of the Adriatic coast, a southern port, and then the capital. Each stop is a new backdrop for the same fight, and the game knows the fight is the point.
The story eventually reveals that Hitler was not killed in the final battle in Germany. He was banished to Hell rather than destroyed, and using his Death Cult he began drawing on Hell’s own energy to build a new army. That is the campaign’s answer to why any of this is happening, and it is enough. Nobody came to Zombie Army 4: Dead War for the narrative, and the narrative knows it.
Four players, one mess
The modes are single player, multiplayer and co-operative, and the co-operative mode is the reason the game exists. Zombie Army 4: Dead War is an arcade shooter in the plainest sense: waves of enemies, escalating weapons, and a squad that has to keep moving or get buried. The third-person perspective keeps the action readable when the screen fills with bodies, which it does constantly.
The arcade label matters. This is not a game asking to be taken seriously as a horror experience, despite the themes of action, fantasy and horror it carries. It is a game about the pleasure of a well-placed shot and the panic of a reload that takes one second too long. Rebellion made Sniper Elite 4, and the shooting here inherits that studio’s feel for impact, even when the target is a demonic mutant instead of a soldier.
What the 7.3 means
The published critical score for Zombie Army 4: Dead War sits at 7.3 out of 10, an aggregate across nine outlets. That number is honest. This is a good game with a narrow ambition, and it hits that ambition cleanly. It is not trying to be more than a co-op shooter about killing the undead in 1946 Europe, and judged on those terms it works.
The case against it is the case against most games in this lane. The campaign is a sequence of locations rather than a story worth following. The escalation from weak dead to armed dead to hell-powered armor is a curve, not a surprise. Once you have seen the horde pick up a handgun, you have seen the game’s best idea, and everything after that is more of the same at a larger scale. That is fine. It is also the reason the score is 7.3 and not higher.
The case for it is that the same is genuinely good. Four players, a readable third-person camera, and enemies that keep coming. The Dead War is a setting built to justify endless violence, and Rebellion does not waste it. The trip from Milan to Rome is a tour of places to make a last stand, and the game gives you the tools to make each one count.
The Switch version arrived more than two years after the original release, which tells you where this game sits in the publisher’s plans. It is a catalog title now, something to pick up on sale and play with friends who already own it. That is not a slight. Co-op shooters live or die on whether the people you play with keep coming back, and Zombie Army 4: Dead War gives them a reason to.
What matters most is the intelligence turn. A horde that only shambles forward is a chore. A horde that shoots back, badly, is a problem you have to solve while three other people are solving their own. That is the difference between a game you finish and a game you replay, and it is the strongest thing Zombie Army 4: Dead War has going for it.
The rest is noise. The Hitler-in-hell framing is a premise, not a payoff. The cult is a rumor the game never needs to explain. The vehicles are set dressing for a fight you were already going to have. None of it hurts, and none of it is why you stay.
Zombie Army 4: Dead War is a 7.3 out of 10.
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