There are hundreds of zombies heading straight toward you, you’re hopelessly outnumbered, and there definitely aren’t enough bullets to kill all of them. Solo developer GFX47 has announced Respect the Horde, a new top-down zombie game combining extraction shooter, tower defense, and roguelite elements into something where simply shooting everything that moves isn’t going to get you very far.
Instead, survival means taking advantage of the one thing you have that several hundred hungry zombies apparently don’t…a plan.
Hundreds of Zombies, Not Enough Bullets
The basic idea behind Respect the Horde is that zombies might be dangerous, but they’re also predictable. Rather than expecting you to mow down enormous crowds by yourself, the game lets you manipulate how the horde moves through each environment. Barriers can redirect zombies, carefully placed obstacles can funnel them into bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks can conveniently lead straight into barbed wire, fire, traps, and other environmental hazards.
You still have weapons, of course, but ammunition is limited and the bigger the horde becomes, the more important all that preparation gets. That creates something that sits somewhere between a top-down shooter and tower defense. You’re actively exploring and fighting zombies yourself, while simultaneously constructing defenses and trying to make sure the hundreds of undead heading your way arrive exactly where you want them.
Knowing When to Leave Is Part of the Plan
There’s an extraction element behind all of this too, and Respect the Horde doesn’t reward greed. Each mission sends you into abandoned locations in search of weapons, ammunition, equipment, and other useful resources. Killing zombies earns increasingly valuable rewards, but sticking around also makes the horde more dangerous.
Eventually you have a decision to make. Extract with everything you’ve collected or hang around for another wave and potentially leave with considerably more. That’s assuming you leave at all.
Anything successfully extracted makes your group stronger for future missions, with permanent progression allowing you to unlock new skills, equipment, and survivors as the campaign continues.
Death can make things more complicated too. Lose one of your survivors while exploring and they’ll become another member of the horde. Not only have you lost someone useful, you’ll eventually have to put an end to their considerably less friendly second career.
You’re Taking Back an Entire Island
Individual missions are all part of a much larger attempt to reclaim an island from the undead. Players choose where to deploy from an island map, with different locations offering their own opportunities, advantages, and dangers. Successfully reclaiming regions lets you gradually push deeper into infected territory, hopefully becoming better equipped to deal with whatever is waiting further inland.
The result is a constant balance between preparing for the future and surviving whatever terrible decision you’ve just made in the present.
It’s also the latest game from Sébastien Dubois, the French solo developer behind GFX47. Before going independent, Dubois worked at Ubisoft and Amplitude Studios, where he served as lead programmer on Dungeon of the Endless. He later created Gladiabots and tactical planning game No Plan B.
There’s a pretty clear connection between those games and Respect the Horde too. They may play very differently, but all three give you predictable systems and then ask you to figure out increasingly clever ways to exploit them. This time, those systems just happen to involve several hundred zombies trying to eat you.
Respect the Horde is currently in development for PC and can be wishlisted on Steam. There’s no release date yet but whenever it does arrive, remember, you don’t necessarily need more bullets. You just need somewhere to send the zombies.