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Two thumbs and nothing to learn. A joystick appears wherever your left thumb lands on the left half of the screen and moves you. Another appears wherever your right thumb lands, aims you, and starts firing once you push it out far enough.

Everything else sits on one row along the outer edges, well clear of where the thumbs rest:

• ⚔ or ✷ — your left hand. The knife, once you have bought one; a grenade takes the button over for as long as you have one left.
• ▤ — place. Only there once you own something to put down.
• ◄ ► — step through the guns you brought. Not there at all with a single gun.
• ❙❙ — pause, top right.

There isn't one, and there is no way to ask for a reload. An empty magazine fills itself the moment it runs dry; a part-full one stays as it is until it runs out. The bar under the round count in the top-right corner is the magazine filling.

It used to be a button. It spent most of a run doing what the empty magazine now does by itself, so it went.

Press ▤. Time drops to a twelfth of itself on a campaign level, the camera pulls in, a board of squares comes up around you and a bar of everything in your pack opens along the bottom. Tap a tile to pick that thing up, then tap a square to put it down. Press ▤ again to leave.

In a co-op match the clock does not slow down, because everybody else is still fighting.

Each level has three difficulty settings — Normal, Hard and Veteran — and on each of them you can take two stars: one for finishing the level and one for the extra goal printed on its card. Six in total, and the card turns gold when all six are in.

They are also the receipt. A town costs what two stars of each of its ten levels pay out, so a clean pass of a town earns back exactly what the town cost in star bonuses alone — and everything the horde dropped on the way is profit on top.

Three things get most people moving again:

• Change what you packed. The loadout screen is not a formality. If it keeps killing you from the same direction, pack a barricade and a turret rather than a better gun.
• Drop the difficulty. Normal still pays out and still gives you two of the six stars. Come back for the others.
• Go and earn. Replaying an easier level for coins is faster than it looks, and the shop is on the level-failed screen for exactly that reason.

Yes. There are two sliders in the game's settings: one for the guns and the fight, and one for the background — the rain, the thunder, the wind and the rest of the scenery. Pull the background one all the way down and the fight is still fully audible.

No. Coins drop off every zombie you kill, fly to you when you get near and are banked the moment you touch them, and every level pays out on top. Every weapon, every upgrade, every defence and every level in the game can be bought with coins you earned by playing.

The coin packs are a shortcut for people who would rather not grind. There is nothing in MEATGRID that only money can open.

You buy the town, once, with coins — and then all ten of its levels are open and nothing inside it ever has a price on it again. City Day is free, all ten levels of it, so a fresh install always has somewhere to start earning.

A town costs what two stars of each of its ten levels pay out, which means a clean pass of a town pays its own price back in star bonuses alone. The dearest town in the game is inside one untidy pass of the free one.

Six sizes of coin pack, and a one-time starter kit that hands over a pile of coins and makes every coin you earn from then on worth a quarter more. The prices are shown inside the game in your own currency, and on the App Store page — Apple sets what the equivalent is in each country.

The first pack you ever buy is doubled.

Almost always one of three things, in this order:

• The purchase is still in the air. A slow connection can leave Apple's confirmation behind. Close the game fully and open it again — the till checks for unfinished purchases every time it opens, and hands over anything it finds.
• It needs a restore. In the game's coin store, use Restore purchases. That asks Apple directly, using the Apple Account signed in on the device.
• It is a different Apple Account. A purchase belongs to the account that made it. If the phone is signed into another one, the till will not see it.

Still nothing? Email us with the date and the pack you bought and we will sort it out. Do not buy it a second time.

Refunds for anything bought in an app are handled by Apple, not by us — we never see the payment and have no way to reverse it. Ask at reportaproblem.apple.com, signed in with the Apple Account that made the purchase.

If the reason for the refund is something we broke, tell us as well. We would rather fix it.

Switch purchases off for the whole device in Settings › Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions › iTunes & App Store Purchases, and set In-app Purchases to Don't Allow. The game carries on working completely; the coin store simply stops selling.

One phone hosts, up to three more join, 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. Go down and another player can pick you up.

It runs over the local network between the phones. There is no server, no account and no internet needed.

Work down this list — it is nearly always one of these:

• Same network. Both phones on the same Wi-Fi. Not one on Wi-Fi and one on 5G.
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, on both phones. It uses both to find the other side, even when the game itself runs over Wi-Fi.
• Local network permission. Settings › MEATGRID › Local Network must be on, on every phone. If you tapped "Don't Allow" the first time, this is where you undo it.
• Not a guest network. Guest Wi-Fi, hotel Wi-Fi, school and office networks usually isolate devices from each other on purpose, and nothing will find anything. A phone's personal hotspot works well as a fallback.
• Low Data Mode and VPNs can both get in the way. Try with them off.

The name in the lobby is the name that phone has in Settings › General › About › Name. Change it there and the lobby changes with it. We do not store it anywhere; it is only used to tell one player from another while a match is open.

Not at the moment. Co-op is local by design — it finds phones near you and needs no account, no server and no connection to the outside world. Online play would need all three.

An iPhone or iPad running iOS 17 or later. The game is landscape-only — if it comes up sideways, rotate the device, and check that the rotation lock is off.

The heaviest moments in the game are twenty bodies on screen with a storm overhead. A few things that help on an older device:

• Close other apps, particularly anything playing video or holding the camera.
• Let the phone cool down. A hot phone slows itself deliberately, and a long session in a warm room will get there.
• Low Power Mode caps the frame rate. Switching it off often fixes it outright.

If it stutters on a recent phone in a cool room, that is a bug — please tell us which level and which map.

The camera shakes when you fire and the lightning on the storm map is deliberately sudden. If that is a problem, turn on Settings › Accessibility › Motion › Reduce Motion on the device and tell us what you find still difficult — we would rather hear it than have you stop playing.

In the game, on your device, and nowhere else. There is no account and no cloud save, which is also why nothing about your game ever reaches us. See the privacy policy for exactly what is kept.

Because the save lives on the device, it only travels if the new phone was restored from a backup of the old one — an encrypted iPhone backup, in iCloud or on a computer, includes it. Setting the new phone up as new starts the game fresh.

Coin packs you paid for are a separate matter and can always be brought back with Restore purchases in the coin store. Earned progress cannot be restored that way, but write to us anyway — tell us roughly where you were and we will see what we can do.

Yes. Everything the game stored goes with it, including stars, coins and anything you unlocked. Purchases made with real money survive, because those live with your Apple Account — reinstall and restore.