Dead Trigger

Zombies, Unity and a lot of borrowed firepower were the recipe Madfinger Games used for this shooter, which it released on iOS and Android in June 2012. It started life as a paid game, yet within weeks the Android version had become free, and that switch made Dead Trigger one of the most talked-about Android games of the year.

What Is Dead Trigger

It is a first-person shooter about surviving a zombie outbreak. You pick missions from a map screen, enter a level and clear it, then spend the cash you earn on weapons and upgrades. The same map gives access to a shop, a casino and an arena, which is a wave-based survival mode for players who just want to see how long they can last. Missions come in two kinds: story missions that move the plot along and generic jobs such as defending doors or killing a set number of zombies. A daily bonus mission pays a small amount of gold.

Madfinger Made Dead Trigger Free Because Of Piracy

The game launched as a paid app on both platforms, priced at around a dollar on Android. In July 2012 Madfinger dropped the Android price to zero and moved to in-app purchases, explaining that the piracy rate on Android was unbelievably high. In a later interview the studio put that rate at about 80 percent. Dead Trigger became one of the most cited examples in the 2012 debate about Android piracy, and it is the reason many players remember it as a free game.

Guns, Gadgets And Upgrades In Dead Trigger

Weapons are modelled closely on real firearms, from the Colt M1911A1 pistol to the AK-47, with shotguns, machine guns and later a minigun alongside them. Melee options include a chainsaw for players who prefer to work up close. Gadgets fill the item slots you take into a mission:

• Medkits for patching up between waves
• Sentry turrets that cover a door or corridor
• Mines for choke points
• Grenades for packed groups

Character upgrades, thirteen of them in the current listing, add health and extra item slots so that you can carry more gear into each mission.

Two currencies run the economy. Cash comes steadily from play and pays for most weapons, whereas gold arrives slowly and mainly serves the store and the ads. That split was the main complaint in reviews: CNET gave the game 8.7 out of 10 yet criticized how long gold takes without paying, and TouchArcade rated it only 2 out of 5. Metacritic settled at 70 from fifteen critics.

Is Dead Trigger Still On Google Play?

Yes, though not under Madfinger’s name. DECA Games now publishes it as Dead Trigger: Survival Shooter, and the listing was updated as recently as September 2026 with version 2.3.4. It has passed 50 million downloads and holds about 4.5 stars from well over a million reviews. The current build contains ads and in-app purchases and carries a Mature 17+ rating for intense violence, blood and language. Progress can be backed up to the cloud, which helps if you change phones.

How It Compares To Dead Trigger 2

Madfinger showed Dead Trigger 2 at NVIDIA’s CES 2013 press event as a Tegra 4 demo and released it on October 23, 2013. The sequel looks better and has more structure, though some players still prefer the first game because missions are short and the mission map makes it easy to dip in for five minutes. The original also runs comfortably on modest phones, which the sequel does not always do.

Tips For The First Hour

Spend early cash on a reliable rifle before buying expensive pistols, because rifles carry most of the early missions. Place a sentry turret near a door before a defence mission starts, since the turret buys time while you reload. Save gold for item slots rather than cosmetic items, and use the arena only once you have a few upgrades, as its later waves grow crowded quickly.