Aim with a thumb
The camera looks ahead in the direction you are pointing and shakes when you fire. No reload button and no way to ask for one: an empty magazine fills itself the moment it runs dry.
5
Towns
iPhone & iPad · coming soon
Meatgrid
A top-down zombie shooter where the street is a grid and the grid is yours to fortify. Five towns, fifty levels and seven guns. They come out of the dark in fours and then in twenties, and you meet them with what you packed and whatever you got built in time.
No account. No ads. Plays entirely offline.
50
Levels
7
Weapons
8
Undead
300
Stars
4
Players
See it move
Ten seconds in and the street is full
Every shot here is the game running on a phone: the crowd finding its way round your barricade, the moment the fog lifts off the whole site because the lightning went off.
City Night
screenshot coming
Under pressure
screenshot coming
The build board
screenshot coming
Sentry fire
screenshot coming
Cinderfall
screenshot coming
Incendiary
screenshot coming
The storm
screenshot coming
Local co-op
screenshot coming
The alley
screenshot coming
Level select
screenshot coming
Pine Hollow
screenshot coming
Close quarters
screenshot coming
What you actually do
Two thumbs, no buttons to learn
A joystick appears wherever your left thumb lands, and another wherever your right one does. Push the right one out far enough and you are firing. Everything hard about this game is somewhere else.
Build mid-fight
Press ▤ and time drops to a twelfth of itself, the camera pulls in and a board of squares comes up around you. Put a barricade where they are coming from. The world behind it is still running.
Six stars a level
One for finishing, and one for each of the two goals printed on the card — at each of three settings. A level turns gold when all six are in, and a card stuck on five is hard to leave alone.
The counter in the alley
Seven guns, and none of them a bigger version of the last
Every one asks something different of you. The belt gun takes your legs away for as long as you hold the trigger down; the revolver gives you six rounds and then a hole in the fight while he reloads. Against a single zombie the launcher is the worst money on the counter, and against twelve of them there is nothing else.
Pistol
SidearmThe gun you are handed, and the only one you never buy. One deliberate shot at a time: slower than the machine pistol, tighter, and with more of a bang behind it.
Yours from the start
Two strains
Eight kinds, and each one walks differently
The green strain carries the first ten difficulties: it comes straight at you and it walks into whatever you put in the way. Then the red strain arrives, and the first thing it does is go round your wall.
Shambler
Drags a leg and nearly falls over on every step. Slow enough to walk away from — until there are nine of them.
Walker
The classic: upright, arms out in front, steady pace, and it never once thinks about stopping.
Runner
Lean, bent deep forward, arms pumping. It is on you before you have decided what to do about it.
Brute
Big and slow, rocking with its whole body. Takes a magazine and keeps coming anyway.
Stalker
The one that teaches you what red means. Goes round a wall rather than into it, and cuts the corner you were running to.
Ripper
Fast, thin, always the first to arrive. Tears at anything you put between it and you.
Gunner
Still holding the sidearm it died with. Hangs back and empties it in your direction — badly, but a stray round is still a round.
Butcher
The red brute. Enormous, unhurried, and the one thing in the game that goes through a barricade faster than round it.
The grid is the point
Decide where they have to walk
A barricade does not kill anything. It takes the straight line away from thirty of them and hands you the one gap you chose. Put a turret behind it and you are holding two approaches with one thumb.
- Pack it before you deploy. Every level starts at the loadout screen: which guns, which defences, how many of each.
- Build while they are walking. Time drops to a twelfth on a campaign level — and in co-op it does not drop at all.
- They eat what you build. A red zombie stops at the barricade and starts chewing, which buys you the seconds you need.
- Mines are spent making the decision. Walked over rather than walked into, and the blast takes your own legs just as happily.
Barricade
CoverPlanks and sandbags. The first thing a red zombie bites instead of you.
Landmine
TrapA plate on a pan of explosive. The crowd sets it off and you never do.
Turret
SentryA poor shot on purpose. What you buy is a second angle that never looks away.
Heavy Turret
EmplacementTwin autocannon on a sandbagged deck. Stands on four squares and earns them.
Five towns
Each with its own plan, its own colours, its own hour
Every town is a 68-metre square with ten levels in it. You buy the town once, with coins the horde dropped somewhere else, and all ten levels open together — nothing inside it ever has a price on it again. City Day is free, so a fresh purse always has a way in, and the dearest town in the game costs less than one scruffy pass of that one.
City Day
screenshot coming
City Day
market square · midday sun
City Night
screenshot coming
City Night
the wasteland · after dark
Pine Hollow
screenshot coming
Pine Hollow
flooded woods · first light
Reactor Four
screenshot coming
Reactor Four
the dead plant · rain and thunder
Cinderfall
screenshot coming
Cinderfall
the burnt district · islands in the melt
300 stars
six on every one of the fifty levels
Fifty jobs
No two levels ask the same thing
Clear the horde
Exactly this many turn up and no more, so the last kill is always the one that ends it.
Beat the clock
This many kills before it runs out. They keep coming, so there is no waiting out a straggler with eight seconds left.
Hunt one kind
Everything else still turns up and still bites. Only the quarry counts.
Hold the ground
Stay alive. The clock counts down to a win rather than to a loss.
Come away with the gold
The one job that makes you walk into the open ground you spent nine levels learning to avoid.
Three settings
Normal, Hard and Veteran. More of them, faster, and harder to put down; the health bar is the same.
Badges on the road
A rare drop off a body: double coins, instant kill, or the whole horde slowed to under half pace.
Local co-op
Four phones on one street
One phone hosts, up to three more join over the local network, and the four of you fight endless waves on a map the host picks. Everybody walks in with what their own phone has unlocked — your guns, your upgrades, your pack — and everybody builds off their own board.
- Your kit is yours. Nobody borrows your machine gun by joining your game.
- Go down and get picked up. Being on the floor only ends your match if everybody else is down there with you.
- No servers, no accounts. It finds the other phones over the local network and that is all.
- The clock never stops. Building in a match happens at full speed, because everybody else is still fighting.
Local co-op
screenshot coming
The small things
Made out of blocks, down to the weather
Every model in the game is built from boxes, and every sound in it is computed rather than loaded off disk.
Rain that stays put
It lands, it splashes, and it sits on the ground while you run through it. Then the lightning goes off and empties the fog off the whole site for a fifth of a second, and the thunder catches up a moment later.
A man who feels it
He moves differently as his health drops — limping, hunched over, panting in place, with a weapon that slowly sags. You can read how badly it is going without looking at the bar.
A back-alley shop
A dealer in silhouette with guns you do not own yet shown as silhouettes too, and a cyborg mechanic at the dead end of the alley who sells a pocket knife, body armour, a trauma rig and a bigger backpack.
Coming to iPhone and iPad
Be there when the shutter goes up
MEATGRID is in the last stretch before the App Store. Send us a line and we will tell you the day it lands. We will not write to you about anything else.