Arsenal

If you want to survive the zombie apocalypse, you’re going to need guns. You begin a round of Nazi Zombies with the weapons you’re entitled to by your rank. At the start of the game, this includes a pocketful of grenades and a sidearm (typically a P-08 pistol). By taking out the first few waves of zombies, you can accumulate Jolts and use them to purchase something better from the weapon lockers scattered throughout Middelberg.

Your Shovel and You: A Zombie Killer’s Guide

The first weapon you acquire in the Prologue stage, the trusty Shovel, is a useful, albeit limited, cornerstone of your Nazi Zombies tactics. You can switch to the Shovel at any time and wield it as a primary weapon, or swing it as your melee attack. Regardless, after the first few waves it takes a few shovel hits to kill even a weak zombie, but it does stun them for a second on impact. You can also use a quick shovel hit to knock off a zombie’s helmet, setting it up for a headshot. Remember that melee kills are worth 130 Jolts, while a gun kill results in just 100 Jolts.

A heavy swing with a Shovel can kill a standard zombie (a Wicht) in one hit, as your character pries off the zombie’s head. This is satisfying, a guaranteed kill, and has a chance of rewarding you with some extra Jolts (usually 50 to 200), some scavenged ammunition (approximately one spare magazine’s worth for every gun you’re carrying), or “lethal equipment” (a grenade).

However, as a trade-off, the decapitation animation cannot be interrupted once it starts, making you vulnerable during the process. If you want to go around digging zombies’ heads off, only hit the lone survivors and occasional stragglers. If you try to methodically shovel a pack of zombies to death, you might get one before the rest kill you.

Starting Weapons

At the start of your Nazi Zombies career, you have your pick of a single gun. As you gain EXP and rank up, you unlock access to better starting weapons, which gives you a big boost in killing potential straight out of the gate.

Your choice of weapon mostly comes down to personal preference. Pistols are accurate and come with a large stock of ammunition, but they don’t pack a lot of punch. If you’re good enough to regularly score head shots, you may favor them as a go-to weapon.

Shotguns are good for up-close combat and are lucrative, as each pull of the trigger fires several pellets, each of which counts as its own attack for scoring purposes. They have a very short effective range, however, and it’s easy to pick one up from weapons lockers.

Assault rifles have range, speed, and flexibility on their side and are the best choice for a Freefire specialist but demand accuracy in order to get results, and the individual rounds tend to be on the weak side. As is the case in Multiplayer Mode, you should fire short, controlled bursts and start popping heads; otherwise, you’ll run out of ammo.

Grenades

As mentioned previously, grenades are a mixed blessing. On one hand, they offer a lot of advantages and pure crowd control. On the other, a zombie that dies in an explosion is only worth 50 Jolts. If you actually hit a zombie with a primed grenade before it goes off, it results in another 10 Jolts.

Be careful when using explosives early in the game, or else you may end up with some “cash flow” problems. At around wave 12 or so, zombies will appear in larger groups so you can go nuts.

There are five types of grenades in Nazi Zombies as part of your loadout. Once you enter a match with your grenade choice, you must stick with that choice for the duration of the match. Each grenade type is valuable in its own way, although throwing knives are a little questionable compared to the others. Ultimately, your choice comes down to your personal preference and your role in the group.

Grenades don’t appear in weapon lockers. Once a match begins, the only ways to reload grenades are by drops from heavy shovel kills or the Taschen Voll power-up. You also receive one “free” grenade every time you survive a wave of zombies.

MK. 2 Fragmentation

There’s a reason it’s a classic. Frag grenades have a five-second fuse and bounce fairly realistically. With the proper throw, you can toss a frag grenade around a corner or over obstacles. It can also ricochet off a zombie’s skull and detonate harmlessly in an empty room. If you’re really unlucky, a zombie may kick it back at you.

So even if you’re in a late wave and an explosion won’t outright kill a zombie, there is still a good chance the resulting explosion will cripple it or at least knock it down. Lastly, you can “cook” a frag grenade by holding down the Throw button, ensuring the detonation will go off when you want.

Sticky Bombs

A sticky bomb, as one might imagine, hits its target (a wall, a zombie, a teammate) and, well, sticks there until it detonates. It inflicts about as much damage in a similar radius as a frag grenade and has a two-second fuse.

It’s easy to guarantee a hit with a sticky bomb. When using one against a charging horde of zombies, try to throw the sticky bomb so it lands toward the back of an oncoming horde.

Satchel Charges

It takes a second for satchel charges to become active once they’re placed. Once live, you can manually detonate them by double-tapping the Reload button. Satchel Charges do not expire once placed, which makes them excellent for setting traps or reinforcing a perimeter. For sheer tactical utility, Satchel Charges are arguably your best option.

Bouncing Betties

Mines take a second to arm once they’ve been set and their placement can be finicky. They don’t always appear exactly where you’re standing when you push the button; instead, they are placed where you’re standing when the mine-laying animation completes. When a Bouncing Betty detonates, it springs into the air and sprays shrapnel over a small surrounding area. For raw damage, mines are on the low end of the explosive spectrum. They have a nasty habit of producing crawler zombies rather than dead ones, but they’re crucial for point defense. If you know where the zombies are coming from, then use some Bouncing Betties and you won’t regret it.

Throwing Knives

If you decide to roll out with a brace of throwing knives, you’ve traded the utility and crowd control of the other options for pure, single-target damage. A single knife is enough to drop a standard zombie; you receive 130 Jolts for the kill. If you miss, simply pick it up and reuse it. As in Multiplayer Mode, knives also offer a powerful, last-ditch defensive option if and when an enemy attacks while you’re reloading.

Knives get significantly less useful as the game progresses, since zombies’ health pools increase. You can use throwing knives to farm easy Jolts at the start of the game by dropping the more powerful zombies with just a few hits. The tougher the zombies get, however, the less useful knives become.

Jack-in-the-Box

The final type of grenade only appears as a relatively common drop from Mystery Boxes. Once acquired, Jack-in-the-Boxes have their own designated button and your supply is tracked in your UI. You begin with three and can acquire more from Taschen Voll power-ups.

When used, Jack-in-the-Boxes get thrown to the ground in a similar fashion to satchel charges. On contact, they emit a jaunty song, drawing in nearby zombies, before the box ultimately explodes. No zombie is immune to the distraction from a Jack-in-the-Box.

Jack-in-the-Boxes don’t go far when thrown. If they hit something in mid-air, they instantly drop to the ground. This means they aren’t great as a decoy if you’re trying to get out of a corner. You’re more likely to bounce one off a nearby zombie’s face and get caught in your own explosion. The Box is also built so low to the ground that it tends to create a lot of crawler zombies when it explodes. If you want to ensure maximum body count, back up the Jack-in-the-Box with a couple of sticky bombs or a Satchel Charge.

It’s worth spending extra Jolts on the Mystery Box early on in an attempt to farm Jack-in-the-Boxes. Much like other grenades, don’t use them indiscriminately. As you progress through the game, point defense and distraction tactics become more vital. It’s at this point that Jack-in-the-Boxes shine. Having the ability to distract part of a zombie horde for a few crucial seconds is absolute gold.

Mystery Boxes

The humble and powerful Mystery Box makes a triumphant return to the fray in Nazi Zombies. Look for it as soon as you get the bunker door open. In exchange for 1,000 Jolts, you can obtain a randomly selected weapon. It can include:

• Any firearm you can get from the weapons lockers in the village.
• Another weapon that’s available in other game modes (for example, the Lewis machine gun or Toggle Action shotgun).
• Other unique toys, such as the Jack-in-the-Box or the Flinegerfaust (a “rocket revolver”).

If you’ve obtained and equipped a Weapon Guarantee power-up, use it to force the Mystery Box to cough up a specific weapon. Remember, though, that you still must pay 1,000 Jolts. In any case, the weapon in question only lasts for a few seconds before it disappears, so grab it quickly.

A Mystery Box can only be used a few times before it’s disabled, at which point it reappears somewhere else in the village. Spawn points for it include the following:

• The front room in the Bunker.
• The near side of the Bridge next to the Tower gate.
• In the small courtyard in the Riverside with the Bouncing Betty trap.

As you may expect, a Mystery Box is almost always a roll of the dice. You may end up with a gun that you couldn’t get in any other way, or you may get something that’s currently useless. Do you feel lucky?

Weapon Lockers

The Nazis have left a wide assortment of firearms scattered throughout the village. Unfortunately, they are also responsible firearm owners and have secured them all inside lockers that only open when fed a certain amount of Jolts.

A freshly purchased firearm comes with a full stock of ammo. You can carry two guns by default (three with the Mule Kick mod) and picking up a new weapon replaces your current gun. You can restock ammo for your current gun by revisiting its weapons locker, if it has one, where you can pay half its original purchase price to max out its ammunition supply.

The Upgrade Station

If you get far enough into the village, you may figure out how to unlock an upgrade station in the Catacombs. In exchange for a cool 5,000 Jolts, you can infuse a current weapon with Geistkraft, empowering it well beyond the limits of simple physics!

A newly upgraded gun gains a new name, as well as across-the-board improvements to its clip size, maximum ammo, and raw damage. Rifles gain a substantial bonus to their accuracy when hip-fired, machine guns weigh less and thus inflict less of a penalty to a character’s movement speed, and long guns in general are less cumbersome. A handful of weapons, such as the M1911 and M1 Garand, receive special bonuses all their own.

There is a downside, however. After upgrading a gun, it’s more expensive to use. You can still reload an upgraded firearm at the upgrade station or its corresponding weapons locker (if one exists), but doing so now costs 4,000 Jolts. You can still resupply by grabbing Taschen Voll power-ups or by looting ammo with heavy shovel attacks, however.

Additionally, the upgraded weapon also disappears if you swap it out for another gun from a weapons locker. To get it back, you must go through the upgrade process all over again.

Most crucially, be careful and attentive when upgrading a weapon. Once the process finishes, you only have a few seconds to grab it from the station before the newly upgraded gun disappears forever. Ideally, you should have teammates run interference while you’re waiting for the upgrade station to finish its work. If you get distracted at a crucial moment, you may end up disarmed and lighter in your wallet!

Weapons