Black Ops 3 Zombies Shadows of Evil Strategy Guide – Boss Tips, Solo and Team

Black Ops 3 Zombies Shadows of Evil strategy guide to help you to get started in the zombies mode. Tips on boss battles, weapons, perks, Gobblegums, Power Ups.

Black Ops 3 Shadows of Evil strategy guide with everything you need to know about the latest zombie adventure.

For more help on Black Ops 3 Zombies Shadows of Evil, read our Buildable Parts Locations, How to Build Pack-a-Punch Machine and Unlock Dead Ops 2 Arcade.

Black Ops 3 Zombies Shadows of Evil Strategy

Shadows of Evil is divided into Canal District, Footlight District, and Waterfront District connected by a central area called the Junction.

Similar to earlier zombies map, it’s recommended to have a team running around with you as you’ll quickly get overwhelmed while running solo.

In this guide, I’ve tried to cover everything there is to know about the Shadows of Evil including points of interest, perk-a-cola locations, and other important aspects.

The Beast Mode
You’ll come across several braziers burning with purple fire across the map. You can interact with these braziers to turn into the beast mode for a limited duration of time. The beast mode allows you to gain extra movement speed, gain new powers to interact with environment –- such as activating power switches –- and new abilities.

Train
If you don’t prefer roaming around on foot, you can also use the train to travel across three districts around the junction for a small fee. This allows you to quickly reach any perk located in another district or to avoid getting overwhelmed by a zombie horde.

Special Zombies

As you progress through to higher waves, you’ll come across three new types of zombies. You’ll know if a wave has one of these special zombies by the fogginess at the start of the round. It’s highly recommended to you deal with these special enemies first before focusing on the common ones.

Parasites
These flying little creatures can prove to be really frustrating. While you’re playing with a full team, make sure to assign someone to deal with these enemies while others deal with common foes.

Insanity Elementals
These little creatures dash towards their targets and explode dealing damage to all nearby players. It’s better to look for an elevated spot and shoot them from a safe distance. It’s not a good idea to engage with other common enemies.

Margwa
These behemoth melee creatures can get you down in only a couple of hits and can only be damaged by shooting them in the yellow spots once their maw opens.

Upon dying, these creatures charge towards you dealing massive amount of damage and even killing you with a single hit. Therefore, it’s advised to engage them from a safe distance.

In order to kill Margwa quickly, you should definitely consider using Ray Gun and Haymaker.

Weapons

There are a ton of weapons that you can find or buy in Shadows of Evil. This section details them all:

Wall Weapons
You’ll come across outlines of various weapons embedded in walls -– these weapons range from pistols to assault rifles –- and must be bought using points. In addition to this, wall weapons get you full ammo reloads.

Mystery Box Weapons
You will come across Mystery Boxes in the city which contain powerful weapons that can be purchased using in-game points. The weapons acquired from these boxes cannot be acquired from anywhere else and their locations are completely random.

Understanding Weapon Kits
Weapon Kits in zombie mode work identically as Gunsmith works in multiplayer mode. As you level up your zombie profile, you’ll gain access to new attachments allowing you to place up to five attachments on a weapon in addition to camo or paint job.

After you’ve customized a weapon in Weapon Kits, that particular customized weapon will appear exactly like that in the game. Therefore, it’s a good idea to customize weapon which you can easily access in the game and then think about customizing mystery box weapons.

Perks

You can also gain access to various perks in Shadows of Evil from perk-a-cola machines. You can use a sum of points to use these machines. Once you activate a perk, it will stay there permanently, but you can only equip four perks at any given time. These perks and their functions include:

  • Quick Revive: A free self-revive service
  • Mule Kick: Allows you to carry three weapons
  • Widow’s Wine: Transforms normal grenades into Semtex which trap nearby zombies
  • Double-Tap: Increases rate-of-fire without consuming additional ammo
  • Juggar-Nog: Increases the amount of damage you can absorb
  • Stamin-Up: Increases sprint duration and speed
  • Speed Cola: Increases reload speed of all weapons

To know more about locations of all these perk-a-cola machines, check out our Shadows of Evil Perks Locations.

Understanding Gobblegum
These are similar to perk-a-cola machines, but the effects offered by them last for a short duration of time or for certain number of rounds unlike perks.

Gobblegum machines can also be found scattered across the map and require certain number of points. However, these vending machines are not 100% guaranteed to work at all times and may give up on you sometimes.

Before starting a match, you can customize which flavors you would like to have in the game from Gobblegum Packs. Initially, you’ll be able to choose from a limited few, but will unlock more after leveling up your online profile.

You should always experiment with different Gobblegum Packs to see what works best for you solo and during team matches and make your decisions accordingly!

Power-Ups
Power-Ups are randomly dropped from downed zombies and include certain boosts. This section provides an overview of all power-ups that you can acquire in a match:

  • Insta-Kill: Allows you to single-shot an enemy
  • Nuke: Allows you to kill every zombie on the map
  • Max Ammo: Allows you to refill yours and every teammate’s ammo
  • Carpenter: Automatically repairs all barricades across the map
  • Double-Points: Doubles up your points for in-game actions
  • Fire Sale: Temporarily spawns Mystery Boxes and reduces prices by 10 points

Best Strategy for Solo and Teams
This section here details the best strategy that has known to work for both solo and team-based matches. The first thing that you need to note is that due to the spawn system of the game, the map is quite harder than what we have seen in earlier zombie maps. For this strategy, I would advise you to run around with a Ray Gun and a Haymaker.

However, if you could get your hands on a Wonder Weapon, that would be a plus. To begin, you need to head downstairs from the area with a large ice cream neon-sign and a perk-a-cola machine right next to it. You need to head all the way to the basement of the area where this strategy will actually come to work.

Once you’re all the way to the basement, you need to keep on moving in the anti-clockwise direction using the openings in the area to your advantage. You will occasionally run into a couple of zombies along the way, but you should be able to deal with them without any problem. After you’ve got a horde of zombies on your tail, simply pull out your most powerful weapon and kill them all at once. This is by far the only area on the map which can house such a large horde without you getting overwhelmed by them.

You need to be constantly on the move in the anti-clockwise direction using the openings and you should be able to climb to higher rounds like 50 or more.

While you’re in the beast mode, you need to ensure that you’re breaking everything in sight and activating every power switch out there; while this may not yield immediate effects, but doing so will definitely serve you better later down the road.

Another thing to bear in mind is that zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops III are far harder than previous games due to their weird spawn system. Zombies in Shadows of Evil can spawn in from almost any location which is what makes them so hard to deal with. However, to tackle with this increased difficulty, there are a number of things that you can try such as Perk-a-Cola machines, Gobblegum machines, and Wonder Weapons.

You need to ensure that you don’t stay in a single area for longer durations of time unless we’re talking about the rift area mentioned above. Needless to say, but killing off a zombie with a melee attack always yields more points than normal kill using a gun. Therefore, at the starting rounds, you should definitely consider weakening zombies with a couple of shots before going in with a melee kill.

At the start, it’s important to accumulate as many points as possible because these points are the part and parcel of the entire zombie experience. These points will not only allow you to access new area, but you’ll also need them to buy new weapons, use machines, and many other things.

Lastly, you should definitely consider taking advantage of the Weapons Kits in the zombie menu. It works similar to Gunsmith in Multiplayer Mode and allows you to place five attachments on your weapons in addition to camo. However, you need to make sure that you don’t upgrade Wonder Weapons or weapons from the Mystery Boxes first and consider weapons which are most easily accessible or available from the start.

Work in Progress! Make sure to share your own tips and strategies with us in the comments section below!

Haider is a freelance contributor, who loves video games, playing guitar, and aviation. He is a competitive FPS player and also enjoys exotic RPG games like Diablo and Xenogears (his favorite game of all time) ...