Dead Frontier

Dead Frontier is a zombie survival MMO that opened its beta in 2008 and is still running. Everything happens in Fairview City, a ruined city where a loot run can end with your character dead and the haul gone. Underneath it is a top-down shooter with RPG progression: you level up, spend stat points, work your way toward heavier weapons (there are over a hundred) and head back to an outpost to sell what you found. You can go out alone, in a group or against other survivors, since the outer zones allow PvP.

The game is free with no entry barrier: make an account and play. The optional subscription, Gold Membership, runs about $8 a month and adds 200 credits when you activate it and on every renewal, a better loot rate with access to level 100 weapons, store discounts (a stat reset drops from 200 to 100 credits) and protection from the automatic deletion of inactive low-level accounts.

Credits also sell separately for real money, covering weapons, armor, resets and limited-edition items, and events usually bring bonus packs. On top of that runs an internal economy the players handle themselves: a marketplace in in-game currency where almost everything you loot changes hands. The game's own line is that you progress fine without Gold, just slower.

It started as a 2D browser game, added a 3D Unity mode in September 2010 and brought in interiors and barricades in 2012. Since 2015 it needs a downloadable client for Windows and Mac, because browsers dropped support for the Unity Web Player; the installer on the official site is currently build 284.

Support is maintenance plus an event calendar: Halloween's Red Harvest came back in 2025, there was a Christmas event, and hardcore ironman runs happen in between. There is no live public roadmap: the development blog stopped in 2016 and the studio blog in 2019, when it announced Dead Frontier: Still Alive, a standalone co-op that never got a date. Creaky Corpse's focus is Dead Frontier 2.

It works if you want a survival shooter with grind, death that costs you something, and a player-run economy that still functions, and if a game that looks like 2010 doesn't bother you. Creaky Corpse publishes no population figures, and third-party estimates put it at hundreds to a few thousand players a day, so don't walk in expecting a crowded city. Anyone after fresh content every month is looking at the wrong game.