Monetizer: World Zombination

hello and welcome to pocketgamer.busy's monetizer feature this is where we look at free to play games and look at their monetization techniques so the game we're looking at today is um world zombie nation um and this is like a tad defense game um where you play um either the survivors or the zombies um obviously the survivors uh defending areas and the infected zombies are attacking so i'm playing as the survivors you can um you get prompts pretty much to change over if you want to but you kind of have to start as one um kind of race or team so this is my unit so it's kind of using um something to be a card based um collection mechanic so these you can see my different um characters are the firefighter here and there's the fire chief and there's a lumberjack these all melee kind of characters you can see they have kind of big physical axes and objects and you have some kind of shooters so we have the outlaw

we have sniper i have commander zita who's one of the high powered characters in this kind of robot thing some more snipers um so to get new um kind of uh characters we have a typical kind of kind of pack scenario we have an uncommon pack a rare pack an epic pack or an epic pack times five guarantees a legendary character so standard kind of thing that we've seen and we buy these with hard currencies so the hard crops in this game is coins um so we can look here um fairly standard there's actually five um different options you can buy so the cheapest is 600 coins for us it's five dollars or you can get 16 000 coins for 100 bucks it's pretty kind of standard kind of a ratios between them it's um you get one point you get 20 more if you spend the most yeah 100 bucks compared to uh the five bucks i've did i haven't i have actually bought some um i've bought the 600 um

coins option earlier which is wait and see i've got about 350 still left so you see up here the other ones you have are um the soft currency so these are different there's different two soft crunches for each um you play the survivors or the infected um so these are supplies which you can buy with um coins or you have this these kind of cans food stacks and these are used um within the game for different things to do so we can have a quick look so we say we're doing some um so research so and in the game there's these two things there's a faster reload um and there's a i don't know there's a stim which increases unit damage for a certain period of time and then we have the this um flare distracts the zombies and then there's a mono molokov cocktail which i can't it's still a lot at the moment they probably won't let me do it i think if i want to um do the upgrade on this one it's going to be 10 000 foods i've already got i've got 11 000

actually so i could do that because take five hours to do um the resources there's a kind of bit of a i mean not really kind of a mining thing but um a certain kind of upgrade thing so you can see i'm kind of collecting some resources there that just keeps going on um there's a nice thing here so you can you have a unit eight character i can drop them in there and they'll help um come speed up the process so you can have use some of your team supposedly supposed to go and help collect the resources um so let's get a certain amount per hour um and then we can also train our characters so these two have been training you can see there's a maximum of three if i want to repair this locker it's gonna cost me a thousand gold i've only got 348 so i can't do that at the moment um but this is how i upgrade my characters so i've got a special ops person that i just unlocked so they've gone to level two um and then i've got what's the other one i've got oh yeah level eight for her so um go back keep training so it's great this

game is actually very um kind of traditional really it's very time focused so um let's go and see so these are my spec ops character so i'm going to start training and training them to level three it's gonna cost me 125 crates and i've got the crates to do that so that's fine um and because it's very kind of unit based as i say like a like a card collection type game every time i fulfill something fulfill a mission i'm going to get some new some new characters so you can see here i got a level one sniper that's pretty rubbish characters are kind of a i've got loads of snipers ready so i can just sell that for 50 and i've got level one so she's rare so i don't want to disband her so i might actually want to um train her up so she's like a healing option so you have the kind of shooter characters you have the melee characters then you have i guess the support characters

um who will heal your character as they go okay so they're taking them take a five minutes to do that or i can finish it just spin one gold coin to finish that straight away there we go completed and there she goes let's train her up again obviously because she's early level characters she's only on level two now um it's pretty quick to speed her up so i haven't got the resources for that moment i'm going to buy some more crates i'm going to use six of my gold so we can see we've done we've seen all this kind of stuff before it takes 10 minutes now to to speed up the speeder up so we can kind of see it's it's a kind of game all about kind of um kind of time so time is a resource that you're spending um high currency on to speed up or obviously you can just wait to do it um there's a certain um you're kind of gated here so i can get if you want to increase my productivity 50 than i would um spend on that um resource we've done all this back so let's go into a quick game and fight

so um so this is there are um you can do pvp um there's guild i'm not in a gill so i can't do that gear infection wars i just do a single player campaign um this is pretty straightforward it loads up so this is the end of the rear generator this is day of eight it's gonna cost cost me a small amount of soft currency to um enter that and it's gonna give me the mod of cocktail as a result so you can see these are my characters if i want to update my team i could do um i think that's kind of fine as it is really and if i was in the guild i get a free unit from the from the guild to the mission so you can see it's recommended power is 200 and my actual power is 660. so she did this fairly well um actually this is in many ways this is kind of a stereotypical kind of free to play game where the meta game is kind of the bigger part of the game so the actual doing all the

leveling up is kind of where you get your fun because that's kind of like what's gated natural gameplay itself is actually kind of fairly straightforward there's not a lot of tactical um things going on here so we can see here these points of where different waves of zombies are going to come from the pink ones the blue ones are where i can place my team and the um like this cup here is where i'm defending so i'm certain i've got three minutes to set my guys in place this is pretty straightforward map just got to defend this so everyone is going to come basically through that area so um the easiest thing to do at this level and probably the most strategically best way to do it but i can just place some melee guys here right in front of where i'm defending um so these guys are fairly blocked off i can play some shooter guys obviously shoot you guys are not so um you it's not they're not so good if they're attacked so that you want to keep them out of the action so start the waves um and you can see now these are on

timers so i'm basically waiting so my sniper guys are shooting as the waves come in um here come the zombies so um i've got these two so this can i can speed up those and so now i've got these melee guys so i can drop these guys in to help out my different uh units i might get around a bit here let's see dropping those in now look this is not very good placement for these guys because they're not even in the action yet and they're doing my strongest characters so i can use this this is a and this will distract the zombies that are moving away

just drop that one so this is the final wave um all right so now we're gonna get some action down there looks like they need some reinforcements oh all right there we go so it's pretty straightforward really um uh and that is um world zombie a nation and you see i've got some trophies and i'm gonna get rewarded as well i hope so as we know that's the

because i finished that whole day section i'm going to get them on cocktail so it's a very straightforward um kind of time based game um very kind of kind of a clean clean look but the actual mechanics behind it um are very um i guess we call them kind of vanilla free to play there's not a lot of um hard selling going in in there and not a lot of kind of extreme retailing at all so it's very unclear what you're spending money on whether it's the whether you're getting the best the best um kind of effective way of kind of getting money out people that said that's another question but um there we go