YMMV / Zombidle

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Ever since crafting of Greed and War Splinters became possible^note Both require two Ectoplasm Prisms, and a single Death Mason Jar/Elixir of Madness respectively, many players feel that the only right way to use the Arcane Forge is to keep crafting the splinters, their ingredients, and their respective shards, since shards and splinters are the only craftable items that scale multiplicatively as compared to the other items which scale additively.
• Difficulty Spike: The King and his guard are far tougher than any of the citizens' buildings before them. And even if the king goes down easily, the kingdom's Wizard is even tougher, with over 30 times the health of the king and far shorter of a time limit!
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • During the Halloween event, it was possible to beat the event challenges more than once, obtaining several copies of the event items. Sadly, this was quickly noticed and fixed, though those who'd already gotten the items could keep them.
  • On occasion, scrolls effects will last not five minutes but several hours. This was eventually rectified, however.
  • It's possible to get the Ultimate Badge along with a second copy of the Steam, Web, and Mobile Badges. When the player logs onto their account on the Steam, Web, and Mobile versions of Zombidle, they get the respective badges, which can be crafted into the Ultimate Badge. Once that's crafted, the player loses their three badges to make it... and the bug occurs when they are able to collect all three of them again. However, the player can only have one Ultimate Badge as that's unique, so crafting them together again won't help.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Magic Potato Baby was considered a Power Up Letdown thanks to giving 30 orb drops for every boss. One of its ingredients to create it was a far better item that gave 20% of white orb drops, which was multiplicative and benefitted more in the long run. The devs rectified this in a patch by changing the Magic Potato Baby's effect to give an even better 50% of white orb drops instead.
• Scrappy Mechanic: While the devs do go out of their way to avoid or even correct these, there are still some that exist:
  • Event Level Scaling is one of the least-liked mechanics among players. All event bosses, challenges and levels are scaled to the highest level the player has beaten, and usually starts from that point. During the late-game, increasing your damage and skull gain becomes a pretty huge grind thanks to the time needed to create shards, thus making it hard to tackle these events if you scaled your levels too high. As such, this causes most players to opt not to progress in the game while accumulating shards/splinters, saving them up for a large event.
  • During the Gonzoland event, there was an eventual hard cap on the amount of event currency you could obtain, where the chance of houses dropping items would plummet straight to zero (instead of a miniscule but possible amount) as soon as they hit the cap. Several players were not happy with this since it discouraged active gameplay. Thankfully, the developers fixed this in the Halloween event update, much to the joy of active players...
  • ...but another Scrappy Mechanic was added: Sloth's Form no longer keeps Bob asleep. This wouldn't have been a big problem if not for the fact that another unique item was introduced in the same update, which allowed Bob to obtain 2x skulls when asleep. As many late-game players use the Perma-Sloth trick, it makes said item utterly useless.
• Squick:
  • The appropriately-named Nasty items given out by Maurice the giant demonic snail for completing their bounties. All of them are Covered in Gunge because he/she lays an egg that "hatches" into said item.
  • Several of the organs that Bob can replace his own with are either full of tentacles/extra heart valves, or infected.
• That One Achievement: The Steam Achievement "Got 49 problems but a shard ain't one" requires you to spend over half your current White Orbs in one go for a treasure chest or Shard purchase. Not only does the game give you another long string of yes/no options like with the ludicrous gem pack (with the yes and no options swapped at the end just to discourage/troll you), but more importantly this also does a massive hit on your DPS thanks to at least half your White Orbs gone.
• That One Boss:
  • The Wizards of each kingdom, at least the first time you're able to fight them by clearing every area then taking a portal. Your initial time limit to beat them is ludicrously short (5 seconds, but magic rings extend this), they have more health than the kings themselves (26 levels over the king, and 51 over the Kingdom's last stage), and finally you only get one chance at beating them per Time Travel- fail to beat them and you've got to go through all your leveling progress again. The good news is that you only need to kill each Wizard once for an entire game, as their defeat persists between Time Travels.
  • The Nightmare Wizards are even worse. They're 255 levels above the final stage of a Nightmare Mode kingdom. If you can just barely manage to beat the final level in the final area of the kingdom, you'd still have no chance in hell against its Nightmare Wizard. Special mention goes to Nightmare Burbtopia's Wizard, as there are no more levels after Nightmare Burbtopia, you can't grind cash/levels and have to either craft a ton of shards or get enough of Maurice's items (The Slime Orb, Rotten Tablet Chunk, or Decaying Shell) in order to push past him.