Dead Party Review: Zombie Co-op With Guitars, Made for a Break From Bigger Games

Dead Party is a co-op action game for one to four players from Radiation Blue. On Halloween, UFOs appear over the town of Shady Hill, the dead climb out of their graves and you and your friends defend houses with barricades, traps and rock music. The game came out on October 29, 2026 on PC, and we played it in a group of three and later four. We’ll tell you what’s fun, what isn’t and who it’s for.

What Dead Party is about

Shady Hill is a quiet American town until Halloween night. UFOs appear over the houses and the neighbors rise from their graves. You face them with four heroes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The campaign runs across a map of the town that looks like a board game, and each location, such as a house, a gas station, a mansion or a film studio, is its own mission.

Besides the campaign there’s Arcade, where you pick the map, difficulty and mode yourself. Difficulty goes from easy all the way up to Nightmare. You can switch characters between rounds and each one levels up separately. Levels unlock cards with passive bonuses, such as tougher metal barricades, deadlier traps or zombies that infect each other and start attacking one another. Now and then you also get cosmetics, like a Frankenstein mask.

How Dead Party plays

Every mission starts the same way. You arrive, smash everything that can be smashed and use the materials to board up windows and doors. Zombies come from outside and try to get in through the windows. Regular zombies are slow, the problem is how many there are. Mixed in are special types: a zombie with a burning head that explodes, armored zombies that only go down to a kick or a stronger weapon, and big bosses. On top of that, aliens from the UFOs attack and they hit hard.

You find weapons by searching boxes, cupboards and presents. In one mission you have a revolver and a shotgun, in another a chainsaw, dynamite or a frying pan. You place traps yourself, and some explode when destroyed and take a whole group with them. The strongest trick is combining the guitar with a kick. The guitar stuns zombies for a moment and makes them dance, then you finish them off. Kick a zombie with an explosive head and it flies into the others and blows up there. Your music meter refills as you kill, so you don’t have to save the guitar.

Four modes

Showtime: you search the map for stage equipment like an amplifier and a microphone and set it up on stage. Fuel Run: you collect fuel cans and fill generators that open more of the map and finally power up an antenna. Careful, some zombies carry fuel cans too and they can explode. Skull Cannon: dead zombies drop skulls, you load them into a cannon and shoot down UFOs. Horde: just survive endless waves. On our first try we lasted 13 minutes before getting overrun, because we smashed more than we barricaded.

What works and what doesn’t

Dead Party is at its best with four players. It plays online, on one screen and via Remote Play Together, so you can play with a friend on the couch. Reviving a teammate is easy, you just walk up to them. Dying doesn’t take you out for long and the game stays fast. Your character can’t jump though, which is surprising in 2026.

The main downside is repetition. Missions always follow the same skeleton: smash, barricade, find items, survive. After a few evenings nothing new comes along. Character levels and cards exist, but they don’t change the game enough to pull you forward the way other co-op games do. Hunting for the last item can drag too. In Showtime we searched for the last piece of equipment for almost an hour before a random player who joined our public game found it. Some missions, on the other hand, end so quickly that you expect a big finale and it never comes.

Price, platforms and languages

On Steam Dead Party costs €20.49 / $19.99, and it’s also on the Epic Games Store. It runs on Windows only. A GTX 960 or RX 470, 4 GB of RAM and 6 GB of disk space are enough. The publisher has announced console versions but hasn’t given a date yet. The game supports English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese.

Dead Party is the spiritual successor to Dead Block, which the same developers released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2011. The idea of barricading a house and surviving a horde is still there, now with four-player co-op, UFOs and guitars.

Who Dead Party is for (and who it isn’t)

It’s for you if you have a group and want a few evenings of something light between more demanding games. Dead Party is the kind of game where you mostly laugh: a teammate accidentally breaks the barricade you just built, a zombie with a fuel can explodes in the wrong room and it all ends with a guitar dance.

Skip it if you’re looking for a game for dozens of hours with builds, loot and long-term progression. We also don’t recommend playing it mostly solo. Without teammates what’s left is repetition that even the humor can’t carry.

Verdict: Is Dead Party worth it?

Yes, if you have people to play with. Dead Party is fun, wacky co-op at a fair price and a nice break from other games. We give it 8/10.

Barricades, traps, kicking zombies and a guitar that makes them dance work best with four players. Points off for repetitive missions and missing progression. Dead Party isn’t a game you’ll play for months. It’s a game your group comes back to when you want an hour of messing around.

Looking for a squad for Dead Party? The game is at its best with four players, so drop by the GamersTogether Discord. More reviews are in our Reviews section.

FAQ

Playing Dead Party too? Tell us in the comments which mode you like most and how long you lasted in Horde.