Four characters that you barely knew anything about, fighting their way through zombie-infested locations, done as four-player online co-op. World War Z, bearing the officially licensed name and logo of a six-year-old Brad Pitt zombie movie that most people never saw and based on the 2006 book, tries to do both – but don’t worry, there’s precious little story here to get in the way of the main attraction.Ī decade ago, Valve’s Left 4 Dead games hit on a winning formula and helped kick off the modern zombie genre. While some excellent zombie games have focused tightly on telling personal survival stories, others have just been content to place you and a bunch of weapons in front of a horde of the undead and let you have at it.
You never know the names or faces of the zombies that attack you – but you know what they want.
They provide a way of pitting players against a massive, heaving unstoppable force, while still giving them something to actually shoot at. They’re human-like, but they’re not human anymore – so you can happily shoot them, chainsaw them, explode them, set them on fire or squish them without having to worry about inconvenient stuff like feelings. The simple concept of a shambling, unstoppable seething mass of zombies is, of course, perfect for video games. Whether it’s the bleak biological movie terror of 28 Days Later, the prime-time urban decay of The Walking Dead or the weird undead additions to Red Dead Redemption and the Call of Duty series, zombies have become a reliable source of tension and terror that show no signs of fading in popularity.
The nameless nemesis may be a long-time staple of horror film and fiction, but it’s become a genre unto itself over the past decade or so thanks to some high-profile hits.
If there’s one thing the world probably didn’t urgently need at this point, it’s yet another video game about zombies.
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