Stop watching zombies on your TV and start fighting them in your neighborhood.

The team behind the essential survival tool Map of the Dead have created Map of the Dead: Zombie Apocalypse Survival, a location-based app that has you battling zombies around town and stealing supplies from neighbors. Yeah, stealing from your neighbors. It's a zombie-eat-brain world out there and sometimes you gotta steal from your friends to get ahead.

The game uses real-world location and Foursquare data to display businesses within a three to four block radius. The app determines a business's potential as a supply cache (food, clothing and weapons) and how many zombies could hide inside. To keep you from running into the neighborhood coffee shop only to be mauled by a zombie horde, the app assigns a threat level of one (safest) to four (Walking Dead finale kind of danger) for each business.

But as any zombie movie aficionado will tell you, zombies are like clowns – creepy and capable of cramming themselves like sardines into a tight space. Therefore, a cafe with a level one threat might actually be a meeting spot for every zombie in a two block radius. Maybe they have a thing for scones? Who knows, but such surprises keeps the game from getting predictable.

Fights are turn-based. Take a swipe with your axe or shot with your rifle by tapping a moving slide bar when it's in the red hit zone. Score a few hits, then wait for the zombies to take their turn. The outcome is determined by how powerful your weapon is, what type of armor you're wearing and, as in all RPGs, a bit or random battle randomness. That means your axe might be capable of delivering 43 hit points but only gives you half that.

All this zombie fighting is needed to scavenge local businesses for weapons, food, medicine and clothing. Pretty standard RPG loot.

Zombie block party. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

As you progress and level up, you unlock more weapons and armor. If you don't happen upon a sweet weapon while scavenging, you can use the game's currency – ammo, of course – to buy more powerful weapons, more effective armor and plenty of food to maintain your health. Of course, in-app ammo purchases are available so you can spend real-world money to secure zombie-world ammo to buy items.

All of this contributes to an extremely fun augmented-reality game. After the first few raids, set up a home base to store items you can't keep in your backpack. That means deciding what to take with you when you set off to kill the undead. Take too much and you limit what you can scavenge. Take too little and you may end up as dinner. Becoming the guest of honor at a zombie feast means losing your backpack – and everything in it – for two hours. That's two hours in real time, not game time. That, of course, means someone is almost certainly going to find your pack and take everything but your soda. You can't kill zombies with soda.

If you get tired of fighting zombies alone – or need help overcoming that immense horde at the 7-Eleven, you can enlist friends to form a squad. They can even share a home base and supplies. That could lead to epic zombie slaying, or treacherous back-stabbing when your "friend" runs off with all your loot.

Will the game prepare you for an actual zombie a apocalypse? Probably not, tapping on glass doesn't really translate to the survival instinct. But it does give you a good idea about your local businesses and their resources potential.

Map of the Dead: Zombie Apocalypse Survival is free and available for iOS.