Your First Containment Mission in Zombies Aren't Real

The shape of a mission

Zombies Aren’t Real missions have two distinct halves, and they need different thinking. The planning phase is calm: you look down on a real city, nothing is attacking, and you spend a budget. The battle is not: zombies appear, fan out through the streets, and start infecting the population while you adapt in real time.

The store page describes the setup exactly: you get a bird’s-eye view of the city and you can see where the infection will begin. You have limited resources. The zombies will fan out and begin to infect the population, and you can adapt your plan on the fly - including calling in bombers or gatling gun helicopters when the perimeter breaks.

What to do in the planning phase

The planning menu has four groups, and each one answers a different question.

Build the safe zone. Safe zones are drawn per cell and cost money for every cell you enclose - the screen in the official store screenshots prices it at $1.00 per cell in a scenario with a $9,410 budget. A safe zone is only useful if two things are true: enough civilians can reach or stay inside it, and you can actually defend its boundary. A sprawling perimeter with nothing on the walls is the most common way to lose a first mission.

Give people a way in. Gates are the openings that let civilians outside your safe zone reach safety once the outbreak starts. A tight safe zone plus a few gates beats a huge safe zone with none, because your starting coverage does not have to equal your final survival percentage - people who enter through a gate count too.

Put soldiers where they can shoot. Garrisons, snipers, turrets and mortars all cost money, and each covers a different problem (the units page starts the individual notes). The rule underneath all of them: a unit that cannot see the wall it is supposed to defend is a unit you paid for and did not use.

Set your loadout and ready up. Before you start, you pick the battle abilities you will carry into the fight - the loadout screen shows how many skill points you have left - and then press ready. Once the battle starts you cannot rebuild your safe zone from scratch; the abilities you brought are what you have.

What the battle looks like

• Speed and pause. The speed controls step from 1x up to 8x and the pause key freezes the map. Speeding up is normal - the early minutes of an outbreak are mostly watching the spread develop.
• Battle abilities. The bottom bar holds the abilities you loaded. Paratroopers, strikes, missiles, gas, helicopter support and APCs appear across the official screenshots; which ones you have depends on the scenario and your unlocks.
• The stats panel. It tracks civilians left, zombies alive, and kills per unit type. That last number is the honest scorecard of your plan: if your garrisons have 9 kills and your helicopters have 492, you now know where your money went.

What winning looks like

You win by eliminating every zombie. Your score is the number of civilians you saved. That order matters: a run that kills every zombie but loses the district is a win on paper, and the game still grades you on the people.

The strongest runs share three habits: a safe zone no bigger than the defenders on its walls, gates placed where fleeing civilians actually are, and air support held back until the perimeter is about to break instead of spent on the first cluster.

The developer is explicit about what kind of game this is: Zombies Aren’t Real is highly strategic, it is not an incremental game, and losing is part of the design. Restarting a scenario once defeat is inevitable, so you can change the plan, is the intended loop rather than a punishment.

faq:

• question: “Do civilians outside my safe zone count?” answer: “Yes, if they can get in. Gates are the openings that let civilians outside your wall reach safety once the outbreak starts, and people who enter through a gate count toward the survival percentage. That is why a tight safe zone with gates beats a huge safe zone with none.”
• question: “Can I rebuild my safe zone during the battle?” answer: “No. The building and wall layout must be prepared in the planning phase, before you press ready. During the battle you can deploy battle abilities and spend remaining money, but the initial layout is fixed.”
• question: “What happens if the zombies break through?” answer: “You can call in air support - bombers or gatling gun helicopters - to stop the spread before it gets out of control. Aim them carefully: the store page warns to minimise civilian casualties, and your score is the civilians you saved.”