Infectonator 3: Apocalypse Review

What a hidden gem of a game is this. The tutorial is not the best, but once you understand the game it is so much fun. It has no missable achievements and requires at least 3 playthroughs.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 12h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 3 (2x winning the campaign and one time losing)
Is there a good guide available: I used this guide to find out how to unlock the achievements and I specifically used the strategy explained by jaredeveridge in this topic for the winning with a score of 500K or more
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, increasing the alert/panic level 1k and seeing 500 news items is a bit of a grind. Gladly for that later one there is a trick if you have software that can auto-click for you. I’ll explain more below.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: A tiny bit
Does difficulty affect achievements: Hmm for the most part no, but for the 500k achievement you’ll want to play on normal instead of easy.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

A few years ago I watched a YouTuber playing this a lot and it always looked so much fun. a while after that I got my own copy but never played it, till yesterday and I also unlocked all the achievements in one day because I had just so much fun!

In Infectonator 3: Apocalypse, you try to kill 9preferable everybody) an x amount of humans in a level with your zombies. And the levels start small with also only a few required to kill, but the more you attack the same region the harder it gets. At first you want to attack as many different zones as you get, to get easy experience, but also to make the whole map available for you at any time.

While doing so, you’ll unlock DNA with which you can buy new zombie types and also general upgrades. You’ll also find more zombies, which you can combine and with enough, you can level up your zombies. and some very special zombies which are a bit stronger, but have only one copy available in a run. The good news about those is.. that you don’t have to combine other zombies to make them. once unlocked, you just have them. (My favorite one is the Yeti, which can be found by killing 200 people in snowy areas AKA rusland).

At first, I thought I just sucked at the game, and I thought I made no chance to win the game.. what I didn’t realize yet is that I played on easy where you can’t lose, as the humans don’t work on a cure. And I also didn’t realize you can upgrade already bought DNA upgrades and you can upgrade the special zombies. After understanding more of the game mechanics, it became so much more fun. The game doesn’t explain much, kinda only the bare basics, and it is up to you to figure out the rest.

Because of this and with the achievements in thought. I would recommend playing your first game on the easy difficulty with the tutorial on, so you can learn how the game plays and what you need to do to win without the worry of losing. As a second playthrough, I would do a normal run with the tutorial on so now you can see how the humans work on the cure, but lose this game (which can be done by just waiting on the world map when they start making the cure), but this might be a good opportunity just to figure stuff out, and for the achievements with increasing panic levels 1k times it might be worth it to just keep playing, as long as you’re losing. This is also a nice opportunity to check which achievements you’re still missing and go for those. Lastly, I would do a normal run, with the tutorial disabled, following the strategy of jaredeveridge in the topic above. You want the tutorial off for this run because the tutorial will force you to buy more zombie variations, and for that strategy, you don’t want any of those DNA upgrades.

None of the achievements are missable, and most of them are easy to get in new runs, except for the 2 wins and a win with 500k. But a run only takes around 3 to 4 hours or so. Seeing 500 times a news item is grindy and annoying, but if you play on the easy difficulty, you can’t lose. you could stay on the world map and just click there on continue when a news item pops up. With an auto clicker, you don’t even have to be behind your PC.

I’m glad I didn’t give up at that point where I felt I didn’t understand the game and I was a failure. What kept me going was the easy achievements I had left, so I kinda kept going to just get as many as possible, and the more I played, the more I understood the strategy, as well as the fun of this hidden gem.

This review for Infectonator 3: Apocalypse was written on 1 January 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 41 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.