MEATGRID: Zombie Shooter

MEATGRID is a top-down zombie shooter where you defend a street with seven guns and whatever barricades you can put up before the horde arrives.

The zombies come a few at a time, then by the dozen. Controls are dead easy: one thumb moves and the other aims and fires. Guns reload themselves when they run dry.

SEVEN GUNS Hold the trigger on the machine gun and you can't move until you let go. The revolver hits like a lorry and reloads slowly. For doorways there's the shotgun, or the flamethrower with its seven-metre reach. The launcher is wasted on a single zombie and comes into its own when twelve turn up at once.

BUILD WHILE THEY WALK Tap build and time slows to a twelfth while you put barricades, mines and turrets on the grid around you. Leave one gap in your barricades and thirty zombies will queue for it, which is what the flamethrower is for. Turrets are poor shots but cover a second approach. The horde sets off your mines, and the blast hurts you too if you're close.

EIGHT KINDS OF ZOMBIE Green zombies walk straight at you and into whatever you put in their way. Shamblers drag a leg and runners reach you before you've made a plan, while a brute can soak up a full magazine and keep walking. The red strain shows up later and goes round your barricades instead of into them. Its gunners still carry the pistols they died with and fire them in your general direction. Butchers go straight through barricades.

FIVE TOWNS, FIFTY LEVELS You'll fight in a sunny market square, the same city after dark, flooded woods at first light, a dead reactor in a thunderstorm and a burnt district sinking into the melt. Each town has ten levels, and each level gives you a job: clear the horde, beat the clock, hunt one kind of zombie, survive until the timer runs out or run into the open for the gold. Every level has six stars to earn across Normal, Hard and Veteran, 300 in total.

BRING THREE MATES Up to four players can fight together over a local network, each on their own iPhone or iPad, with no servers involved. One phone hosts and everyone brings the guns and upgrades they've unlocked. Co-op is endless waves, and building doesn't slow time because your mates are still fighting. A teammate can pick you up when you go down, and the match only ends when all of you are on the floor.

SHOP IN THE ALLEY The horde drops coins, and the alley is where you spend them. A dealer sells guns you don't own yet, and a cyborg mechanic at the dead end sells a pocket knife, body armour, a trauma rig and a bigger backpack. Buy a town once and all ten of its levels stay open for good. Now and then a zombie drops a badge for double coins, instant kills or a horde slowed to under half speed.

BUILT FROM BOXES Every model is made of blocks and every sound is generated on the fly. Rain stays on the ground after it lands, and a lightning strike clears the fog off the whole map for a split second. Your marine starts limping and panting as he takes damage, so you can tell how badly it's going without checking the health bar.

MEATGRID has no ads, needs no account and plays fully offline.

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