Zombie Uprising

The shape of this one is wave, pause, wave. Each round closes with a brief window to reinforce before the next arrives, so the game alternates between a stretch where the hands work and a stretch where the head does — and most runs are lost in the second kind.

Reinforcing well means looking one wave ahead. Adding raw damage when the real problem is sheer numbers achieves less than raising the rate of fire or widening the area you can hold. Turn it around, though, and a wave led by something thick-skinned makes concentrated damage the better buy. The pleasure is that nothing is announced in advance; it has to be read from what just came through.

By the closing waves everything overlaps into apparent chaos, yet reviewing a loss usually shows it was settled minutes earlier by a wrong pick during a quiet window. That is the appeal of the lane: defeats you can explain rather than defeats that just happened.