A retrospective of the zombie games era, and the ones you should try.

Dead island, killing zombies with crazy weapons and weird coop animations

If you were playing video games back in 2014/2015, you probably noticed the crazy amount of zombie games being released during those few years.
From survival games to slashers, to horde modes, to tower defense games, zombie games came in all shapes and forms.

Since then, the hype has slowly died out, and we've seen less and less zombie titles.
So here I am today, looking back at the best games released during the survival/zombie games era, or the most relevant ones, aswell as the future of the genre as of 2018.

Dead Island and Dying Light

Those 2 games go together, considering they are pretty much cousins, since they share developping teams, even tho Dying Light is usually considered the better game, being more recent and having pretty sweet parkour mechanics.

The story in those games are very basic, you're stuck in some place with a zombie outbreak, you have some RPG progression system, you improve and customize weapons, do fedex quests, and kill zombies until you're pretty much fed up with the game.

They are all fun and exhilarating, the fighting mechanics are fun, and are an overall good experience, although they both lack polish during the end game parts of the game, (almost like if development was rushed at the end, crazy right?).

Dead island 2 has been on hold for a few years now, and the serie seems pretty much dead, as deep silver (the company producing DI, realized they might not be making their money now that the zombie hype is dead, or "undead")

The Last of Us

One of the most hailed PS4 exclusive games, and one of the most loved zombie game. It's a story driven game, with a apocalyptic background.

Beautiful environments, average gameplay, but interesting mechanics, dialogues, that made it a great game. I haven't personally played it but watched let's plays. It in my opinion deserves a spot in this list of memorable zombie games.

The survival zombie games (H1Z1/DAY Z and others)

Survival zombie games running in similar engines popped up like mushrooms during those years, offering pretty much identical experiences.

The experience was an hardcore permadeath zombie survival elements, with PVE and roleplay elements.

Most of these survival games ended up dying out due to lack of support, and DAYZ has faced a lot of community backlash because of their early access state lasting more than 5 years now.

They were pretty fun experiences on their own, even if they were buggy and sometimes infuriating.

Great moments

The COD zombie modes

Everyone knows about them, you defend yourself against horde of zombies for as long as you can, shooting and knifing through all of them. Fun experience, you need friends tho, or you'll probably die of frustration and/or boredom.

Honorable mention

Left 4 dead 2

It's older than any other game on this list and wasn't really part of this era. That's why it didn't really make it into the main titles.

walking into this article like

The future of the zombie genre

Is the zombie genre dead then?

Well, one might think that, but it seems like we're getting some new zombie games coming out soon.

Between the overly hyped Last of Us 2, the sudden growth of DayZ, getting a lot of updates during the last months, and the kind of looking good Days Gone, coming out next year, it seems like we're not done with zombie games.

The zombie game genre is for sure not in his prime anymore, but it seems like it's far from dead.

Wait and see, and let's hope we get some more greats games, that's all we can wish for.

As usual, thanks for reading me, leave a comment saying which games I might have forgotten or missed, follow me on Instagram, share the article with your grandma !

Tisba, out !