2026 is about to bring us the fourth Halloween
We’ve been through three Halloween events already. Except for the last one, they were basically all fun. Let’s look back.
The first Halloween event
· Location: night-mode Moscow map, first defense point, endless mode
· Pros: ammo resupply and healing; if you unlock weapons early (especially the OP ones), it’s easy
· No flamethrower back then; after the damage and move-speed nerfs, as long as you can dodge fire lines, it’s not too hard
· Verdict: pretty fun, not too difficult; surviving 20 waves basically means you broke even — an hour or two a day and you’re done without breaking a sweat
- It was fun.
- Not that fun.
- Not fun.
The second Halloween event: Earth Shield
· Plays like Left 4 Dead — clear one stage after another
· Use grenades to destroy 15–20 zombie spawn points, defend the radio, fight the boss, then exfil to clear; kind of like the Helldivers-style “destroy the nests / upload the data” modes
· Maps: Berlin, Rzhev, Pacific Guadalcanal, and Tunisia — four maps, all big enough
· Verdict: very fun, memorable, the best one so far
· The only balance-breaker: the Tunisia boss that summons 20 non-despawning self-destructing will-o’-the-wisps, plus all those oases blocking your line of sight; other than that, all good
- It was fun.
- Not that fun.
- Not fun.
The third Halloween event
· Verdict: utter garbage — a gutted version of the second event
· The big maps are gone, cut down to Berlin street fighting; the map is tiny, and if you run out to kite mobs you get gassed to death
· Random weapon crates only open on the final stage; each defense zone is tiny, and the zombie count is cranked to explode
· Boss zombies have way too much HP
· No ammo resupply; and the weapons you get are basically un-upgraded versions with no damage boost
· Player character skills and built-in skill points from the second event removed
· No medkits, no anti-tank rocket launchers, no engineer hammer
· At launch it was a disaster — even the devs’ own replay couldn’t clear it, a total no-survivors situation; 30 minutes of pure wasted life
· Rewards: TT weapons that someone apparently slapped fresh paint on off the tech tree, splashed some blood on, and dared to sell as “new rare event weapons,” dumped into crates to disgust players and pollute the loot pool
· Selling the bloodied RD-44 in the second event was understandable — at least you could actually unlock it in-game and it eased the pressure. What’s the point of this one?
· And on top of that, the weapon is locked behind a teammate tag — only paying players can unlock and use it, nobody else can. That’s a bit too cyberpunk-level disgusting
· The flamethrower squad they gave out was lukewarm at best; compared to the coin flamethrower squad sold before, it even has 100 less fuel
And honestly, every single time — those rooftop or basement holds on stage 2 or stage 3. You’re stuck with some weak-ass weapon, some un-upgraded crappy SMG, crouched in some narrow platform. Can’t run, can’t get out. And your random-match teammates probably won’t listen to a single call — they’ll just charge in and feed, or straight-up quit. What are you supposed to do?
To put it bluntly, it’s like being some poor woman with both ends stuffed and strung up over a fire — completely screwed from every direction with no way out.
The third Halloween event had so many flaws. It wasn’t original, nor was it just a simple copy-paste. It felt like they took the second Halloween and cut out three-quarters of its content.
It really seems like they saw how much fun players had with the second one, and deliberately made this one to frustrate us. Its list of downsides is even longer than all the good parts from the maps of the first and second events combined.
The fourth Halloween is less than ten days away. I really don’t want to go through that nightmare again, that draining experience where playing the game feels like tedious work.
- good
- bad
- ok
After going over the three Halloween events, let’s now take a look at the character themes and mechanics featured in these Halloween events.
- Zombie attacks massively slow down your character
· Other games at most have a grab that triggers an execution animation you cancel by holding Q; here, getting scratched once causes a massive slowdown
· Against a zombie horde, if you’re slow on your feet and get scratched once, it’s basically the same as being deliberately tripped — you’re dead
The worst part is getting scratched by a zombie in the late game. Congratulations, you’re about to watch your health bar pull a disappearing trick. It’s absolutely miserable.
· Then what’s the point of melee? Your melee is mostly single-target, not AoE — it can’t do the lawnmower-musou thing like in World War Z
· A lot of the time you’re just getting schooled by zombies
- yes
- no
In movies, when someone gets kicked or hurt badly, they yelp and flinch right away. But in this game, it’s like you’re frozen by an Ice-shroom and get slowed down. This is where all the realism-focused players ought to back this change.
- The skill problem
· In the game’s fictional setting, the four characters (Japanese samurai, Soviet assault trooper, German machine gunner, American medic) are all named, skilled superhumans
· In-game, though, they give us a one-star, skill-less, 5-second-reload super cripple — the kind even OP weapons can’t save
· Only by the third event, after public pressure, did they grudgingly give a little: better stamina so you don’t die as fast when chased — changing the soup without changing the medicine, doesn’t fix the root problem
· Suggested fix, pick one of three:
· Like TF2’s defense mode, use in-game points to upgrade skills and reach that fully-maxed “super Dutch soldier” state
· Or just buff the soldiers to the super Dutch soldier baseline directly, so players don’t have to grind it themselves
· Or just give 20 points and let each character spend them freely in this special mode (medic / mounting / assault / building defenses / spe
Give these elite, one-in-a-million super soldiers 30-30-30 perk points for us to allocate freely. Halloween only comes once a year; it’s all about having fun, after all.
- Agree, prefer Option 1
- Agree, prefer Option 2
- Agree, prefer Option 3
- Disagree; the soldiers should stay plain with no perks at all.
It’s already been a year. I know DF takes a whole month just to roll out four jeeps in a major update. Hopefully they can spare some time for the Halloween event this time around. I’d hate to see them butcher the first and second events again just to cobble together another stripped-down, smaller version.
Getting a maxed 3-star version of one of these guns only costs a few tens of thousands of silver coins normally.
Yet trying to roll a decent one from the crate can easily burn through a million silver, and you still might not get it.
- New weapons are great.
- Terrible, just a lazy reskin with no effort.
- Remove these from the regular loot crates so they don’t clutter the pool. Put them in a separate, dedicated Halloween crate instead.
- Turn them into weapon decals that we can apply to regular guns, just like tank decals.