Infestation: The New Z
Infestation: The New Z is a free-to-play, open-world zombie survival MMO where the real danger is often other survivors. You will roam a bleak sandbox map, loot whatever you can carry, and try to stay alive in a PvP-heavy environment that rewards aggression just as much as careful scavenging.
 | Publisher: OP Productions, Fredaikis AB Playerbase: Medium Type: F2P Survival MMO Release Date: November 22, 2016 Pros: +Free-to-play entry point. +Straightforward, PvP-driven loop. +A rebuilt take on Infestation: Survivor Stories. Cons: -Visuals show their age. -Little to no onboarding for new players. -Loot spawns are so generous they undermine survival. -Spawn camping can be a recurring problem. |
Infestation: The New Z Overview
Infestation: The New Z drops you into a zombie-ravaged sandbox where staying alive is less about following a quest line and more about making smart decisions with limited information. As the newest version of the long-running WarZ/Infestation lineage, it leans into open exploration, looting, and frequent player conflict. The world is large enough to support long treks through wilderness and mountain areas, but the tension spikes whenever you approach towns, landmarks, and other loot hotspots.
Progress is tied to what you can scavenge and what you can win in fights. You will comb through abandoned buildings for food, weapons, ammo, and medical supplies while trying not to get cornered by zombies or ambushed by other players. Combat is built around quick firefights and opportunistic encounters, with gear ranging from firearms (including long-range rifles) to distinct melee options and utility equipment like night vision. Kills also feed into a simple progression loop, granting experience and money that can be spent through the in-game marketplace for additional equipment.
Infestation: The New Z Key Features:
- Large Open-World Map – travel between empty towns, ruined city blocks, parks, and rugged mountain terrain while searching for supplies.
- PvP-focused Gameplay – expect player encounters in most areas, with combat supported by a wide selection of weapons, from rifles to improvised melee tools.
- Global Vault – store valuables in a personal stash and retrieve them from safe zones or directly through the lobby.
- Private Servers – rent a passworded server if you want a more controlled session with friends or solo play.
- MLG Anticheat – anti-cheat protection is provided by an engine made specifically for the game.
Infestation: The New Z Screenshots
Infestation: The New Z Featured Video
Infestation: The New Z Review
Infestation: The New Z is a 3D, near-future zombie survival MMO built around scavenging, roaming, and constant risk from other players. Like many games in the genre, your moment-to-moment priorities are basic, find food and water, locate a weapon, and avoid getting caught in the open. It is also worth noting that this release is part of a longer, complicated history, it is effectively the third major iteration of the project that began as The WarZ and later became Infestation: Survival Stories.
From a presentation standpoint, the game shows its age quickly. Environments often look rough around the edges, with muddy textures and an overall unfinished feel in places. Character movement and physics can be stiff, and combat feedback does not always sell the impact of hits. Sound design is functional but unremarkable, especially weapon audio that lacks distinct personality. Even character creation is quite limited, with only a few preset bases and relatively light customization, while additional templates are pushed through premium currency.
Learning the Game Without Guidance
Survival sandboxes can be harsh by design, but they still benefit from a clear introduction to core systems. Here, onboarding is minimal, which means new players can spend their first hour confused rather than challenged. You are placed into a persistent PvP world immediately, and if you land near aggressive players, you may be killed before you have any chance to orient yourself. The initial spawn effect, including a noticeable glow, can also make fresh characters easier to spot, particularly in low light when long-range threats are hardest to read.
Starting Gear and Early Priorities
Your first moments typically begin with very basic supplies, a flashlight, a bandage, a soda, and a granola bar. In practice, spawns can feel less varied than you might expect, and repeated deaths can lead to repeating the same opening route. Once you are in, the game is largely self-directed, but the first practical goal is almost always the same, reach the nearest building and loot immediately.
Zombies can sometimes be managed with crude tools early on, but other players are a different story. With points of interest spaced out across the map, the early game often becomes a sprint between structures, hoping to assemble a usable kit before someone else does.
One of the most defining traits of The New Z is how generous loot can be. Weapons, armor, and ammunition show up frequently, even in ordinary houses far from major military areas. That abundance makes it easy to re-arm after a death, but it also shifts the tone away from tense survival and toward constant firefights. When you can rebuild a strong loadout quickly, the fear of losing gear drops, and the overall pacing becomes more arcade-like than many players expect from a survival MMO.
What Happens When You Die
Death is still punishing in the sense that you lose what you were carrying, but the game also layers on a real-time wait before reviving that character, up to an hour. In theory this encourages caution, but in practice it is easy to work around by using another character or simply deleting and recreating, which undercuts the intent of the system.
If you have not prepared ahead of time, coming back can feel especially rough because you may re-enter with very little to defend yourself, sometimes not even a flashlight. This is where the vault system matters most. By storing spare gear in a safe zone vault (and taking advantage of the global access), you can reduce the sting of death and get back into action faster.
The Marketplace Economy
Infestation: The New Z separates its store into premium and standard purchases. Premium items are bought with real money and focus on cosmetics and vehicles, with vehicles being particularly impactful due to the amount of time spent traveling on foot. Standard items are purchased with currency earned in-game and include practical supplies such as melee weapons, armor, food, and medical items.
Conveniently, the marketplace is not limited to being in a match. You can shop from the lobby as well, and anything bought outside a server is deposited into the global vault automatically, which ties the economy directly into the game’s stash-and-redeploy loop.
Skills and Long-Term Progress
Beyond equipment, your character can develop through a skill system funded by experience gained from kills, whether against zombies or players. Skills are grouped into three categories, Physical, Survival, and Weapons, and upgrades require increasingly large experience totals (from 2000 up to 20,000). With zombie kills awarding around 150 experience, higher tiers can demand a significant amount of repetition.
It is also important to remember that character deletion wipes that progress. If you frequently reroll to avoid downtime or bad spawns, you are also resetting your long-term advancement.
Battle Royale Mode
Outside the persistent world, the game includes a 100-player free-for-all Battle Royale option. It is designed for immediate action, you spawn with random weapons and fight in close quarters with the goal of racking up kills. As a quick way to practice gunplay or burn time between lives, it serves a purpose.
However, the mode feels disconnected from the larger progression systems. With no leaderboard and no rewards in experience or money for kills or winning, it tends to function more like a warm-up arena than a meaningful alternative way to play.
Final Verdict – Fair
Infestation: The New Z has a clear identity, it is a PvP-first survival sandbox where conflict is common and gearing up is rarely difficult. Unfortunately, that identity comes with trade-offs. The dated visuals and unremarkable audio do little to elevate the experience, the lack of a proper tutorial makes the early hours harsher than they need to be, and the extremely high loot spawns flatten the survival tension that the setting promises.
If you want a free-to-play, low-friction PvP sandbox with zombies as background pressure, it can deliver some short-term fun. For players looking for a more authentic survival loop, stronger production values, or better structured progression, there are stronger options in the genre.
Infestation: The New Z Links
Infestation: The New Z Official Site
Infestation: The New Z Steam Page
Infestation: The New Z Facebook Page
Infestation: The New Z System Requirements
Minimum Requirements for PC:
Operating System: Windows 7 – SP1 64bit
CPU: AMD® A8 3870 3,6 Ghz or Intel® Core ™ i3 2100 3.1Ghz or better
Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 465 / ATI Radeon TM HD 6870
RAM: 2 GB
Direct X: Version 9.0
Hard Disk Space: 10 GB
Recommended Requirements for PC:
Operating System: Windows 10 – SP1 64bit
CPU: AMD® FX 8150 3.6 GHz or Intel® Core™ i7 2600 3.4 GHz or better
Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 950, ATI Radeon™ R7 360 or better
RAM: 4 GB
Direct X: Version 9.0
Hard Disk Space: 15 GB
Infestation: The New Z Music & Soundtrack
Coming Soon…
Infestation: The New Z Additional Information
Developer: Fredaikis AB
Publishers: OP Productions LLC, Fredaikis AB
Open Alpha Date: October 15, 2012
Initial Steam Release: December 17, 2012.
Steam Relaunch: November 22, 2016
Development History / Background:
Infestation: The New Z is a heavily revised version of The WarZ, a survival MMO that was later renamed Infestation: Survivor Stories after copyright disputes connected to World War Z. It originally launched on Steam, but was removed within days following multiple controversies, including accusations of misleading advertising and widespread cheating. Under new development and publishing, the project returned to Steam with a relaunch on November 22, 2016.