28 Years Later is out: Here are the best zombie games that follow apocalyptic rules
2025.6.20
執筆：Phil Iwaniuk, Contributor
The other half, of course, is killing zombies. And that means these games on the Epic Games Store let you enjoy both sides of the equation. They adhere to conventions that are never outwardly acknowledged, but which every survivor recognises instantly, and they do it in ways that elevate the nuts and bolts of mowing down former humans.
When someone falls down, the undead swarm
In ordinary circumstances, you can easily outrun a zombie—even the ones with some fast-twitch muscle fibers left on their decaying frames and can thus still move at a running pace. During normal gameplay, they just don’t seem that interested in eating you—do you not look delicious enough? It’s almost offensive to see them give up the chase so indifferently after three paces.
Until, of course, you need to pause momentarily and perform a vaguely medical gesture with your arms in the direction of a fallen comrade until a revive bar fills up and they're back on their feet. At this point, every undead being in the nation knows it’s time to strike.
Apparently communicating telepathically, they expend all remaining energy reserves to move as one, rushing you with a speed and ferocity that would make the game impossible if they did it all the time. Thank goodness they don’t.
As seen in: Zombie Army 4, World War Z, No More Room in Hell 2
The undead practice social distancing when in woodland areas
On paper, there’s no reason why the hordes of the end times should prefer one place to another other than the strength of each area's scent of delicious brains. Maybe it’s that the undead’s consumerist conditioning kicks in even in that stupefied state, just as it did in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and they’re drawn to urbanized commercial districts out of habit. In any event, the enemies of Days Gone, Back 4 Blood, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and many other titles agree: cities good, countryside bad.
It’s not that they won’t deign to show their presence out in the woods, but rather that they choose to spread themselves much further apart once they reach the leafy idylls outside built-up areas. Lee and Clementine’s gang of survivors know this well—it’s why they decide to get out of Macon for a nearby farm as soon as they’re able.
However, when the player intrudes upon their social distancing exercise, all bets are off. The hordes you’ll find in Days Gone and Back 4 Blood’s woodlands are as populous and vicious as any in the genre.
As seen in: Days Gone, Back 4 Blood, The Walking Dead
Split up, and you’ll pay the consequences
The inherent uncaring nature of a zombie is a key part of what makes them so scary. This specimen was once a human being you could have sat down and reasoned with, but now, ravaged by whatever virus, witchcraft, or government experiment has rendered it merely semi-alive, the chance for talking your way out of a confrontation has passed. It takes no pleasure in devouring you, nor harbors any animosity. It simply does what its instincts tell it to.
This rule has a single exception: The undead are capable of anger towards only one type of person, and that’s the co-op partner who wanders off too far from the rest of their squad.
It’s these selfish types who sprint off seeking the highest kill count at the end of the level whom the most powerful and elite variants of zombie hunt. The Gunners and Flamers in Zombie Army 4; Bulls, Lurkers, and Juggernauts in World War Z & Aftermath; and Killing Floor 2’s Gorefiends, who are basically sentient knife drawers—all of these specimens sit and wait until one of you exhibits poor co-op etiquette before striking from the shadows to teach you a lesson about how your teammates are a lot more likely to revive you when you're in the same area code.
As seen in: Killing Floor 2, World War Z, Zombie Army 4
Unique enemies won’t show up unless you give them a cool intro
It’s an oft-overlooked aspect of the zombie apocalypse: Some real divas lurk among the hordes of common cannon fodder enemies. They may not ask for hand-picked blue M&Ms on their riders—preferring a simple charcuterie board of unspecified grisly matter—but the most unique enemy variants refuse to make an appearance unless you promise them a cool intro.
Tango Gameworks’ survival-horror-revival series The Evil Within knows this all too well, going to great lengths to build environments that set a tone for its most memorable bosses, like the Butcher in the first game, and Reebo, who you may know better as "ohGodohGodohGodohGod" or "the spider-girl made of severed arms." You’ll never meet one of these specials by simply running into them in an unremarkable warehouse or on the street.
Plants Vs. Zombies flips the script by introducing each new plant in this way, too. A short vignette shows its speciality versus the enemy type it’s designed to counter, sneaking in a little personality as it does so.
As seen in: Plants Vs. Zombies, The Evil Within 1&2
Your fellow survivors spend all their time writing stuff on the walls
Granted, there’s not much to do for fun as a human after the undead apocalypse has begun. Your limited leisure options include counting your ammo, crouch-jumping up to the highest piece of furniture in the safe room, and staring off into the middle distance and thinking about your dead family. Then again, there's always scrawling messages all over the place.
The remaining denizens of apocalypses seem to treat walls like their personal diaries. You wander through the world taking in all kinds of messages, from doomed pleas for help that never came to improbably helpful signposts to nearby safe rooms and ammo. Quite why these survivors deemed it so important to draw an arrow and label the location of some ammo instead of picking it up and using it for themselves is unclear.
Dying Light 2’s beleaguered population uses the medium to document political struggles in Harran, helpfully charting the power struggle between the city’s factions.
As seen in: Dying Light 2, Zombie Army 4, Back 4 Blood
Baseball is the most popular sport in the world and bats are literally everywhere
In the rare moments of downtime during a zombie apocalypse, one might pause to consider all that’s been lost. The tenets of civilized society we once held so dear, the comforts we took for granted: safety, hot running water, a defensive infrastructure, ample food supplies, and—above all else—the sport of baseball.
Clearly, this was humanity’s main focus before the zombies arrived, because there’s at least one baseball bat in every room of every house, commercial building, and industrial space throughout the entire world. Every lunch break, workers presumably downed tools to get a few innings in before returning and placing the bats haphazardly on any nearby surface, or just dropping them on the floor.
What luck, then, that zombies’ craniums are especially vulnerable to a spirited swing with one of them. Dead Island 2 will let you make Heath Robinson-esque energy weapons with them, and Killing Floor 2 combines them with razor wire for a particularly savage form of home run.
As seen in: Dead Island 2, No More Room in Hell 2, Killing Floor 2
That does it for our rundown on the unwritten rules of zombie fiction. You can check out all of these incredible apocalypses for yourself on Epic Games Store.