Quite often, players must improvise, adapt, and work off of what they are given to manage new critical situations. The Director is tasked with placements of items and weapons that players can find, increasing or decreasing the number of enemies you may face at any given time, and generally making the experience less predictable by altering paths, obstacles, the types of defense systems you can use, or objective placements. They will adjust the experience and tailor it to how well or poorly you and your team are doing. To improve replayability, increasing the overall longevity of the game, and making sure that not every playthrough of a chapter is ever the exact same, an AI-controlled Director manipulates the game from the background. Players must complete many different tasks to progress, all culminating towards organizing a defensive stronghold against massive swarms of hundreds upon hundreds of zombies. These episodes take place in New York, Jerusalem, Moscow, Tokyo, Marseille, Rome, and Kamchatka, with most locations following a different set of four survivors. There are seven episodes each containing three or four chapters to play through. The game rewards players that cooperate to be more effective, to progress quickly and stealthily to avoid additional waves of zekes that could be attracted by loud noises, and to search areas for better pick ups such as weapons and helpful items like Medkits. In addition, several special zombies appear to shake things up and break the monotony of the regular zeke hordes by attacking the players in unique ways that encourage teams to work together and overcome. In many cases during these swarm events, they will often climb on each other, forming what is known as a zombie pyramid, allowing them to reach higher levels where the survivors are located at. They appear in waves throughout the game, and in certain areas of the chapter, they come in by the several hundreds in what is known as a swarm. While individually weak, they rely on large groups to take the survivors down. These gameplay aspects become particularly important as the difficulty is raised, making the zombies much tougher and aggressive.

The player has to combine stealth and effective killing spree tactics to navigate around the zombie masses. The main objective of the game is to kill, escape, and survive the zombie apocalypse.

It is a zombie-killing action game that follows unique stories and missions from different parts around the globe. World War Z is primarily a four-player cooperative third-person shooter.

World war game