Zombie games span from survival simulation to co-op period pieces inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, with a shambling detour via tower defense and post-apocalyptic parkour thrown in for good measure.
This zombie game list offers everything a zombie fan could want. We have The Walking Dead’s haunting moral quandaries, Black Ops 3’s high-octane FPS combat, and Resident Evil’s traumatising terror. This is the ultimate list of zombie games on PC, regardless of your decaying taste.
Resident Evil
Without Resident Evil, no list of zombie games would be complete. You could have been scared out of your wits by Resident Evil 7 in VR, or found yourself returning to the action-packed classic that is Resident Evil 4, but there are still plenty of scares in the game that started it all. Resident Evil is one of the best horror games available, even without the superfluous complexity added in subsequent sequels.
As Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, trapped in the notoriously labyrinthine Spencer Mansion, voracious zombies and dangerous mutations lurk around every corner in Resident Evil, often masked or obstructed by creative environmental challenges. Fixed camera angles heighten the sense of claustrophobia, while your limited inventory keeps you feeling vulnerable.
If that isn’t enough to scare you, you can always get the 2015 remastered edition on Steam. This is a remake of a remake, with fresh environments, scenarios, and surprises to ensure Resident Evil is as terrifying as you remember it.
Remake Of Resident Evil 2
While the initial Resident Evil game’s haunted house setting provided the majority of the fright, the gorgeous remake of Resident Evil 2 makes the zombies the stars of the show. These are the most terrifying undead shufflers the series has ever created, with each one’s distorted, bloodied visage telling a tale about how they were infected. Resident Evil 2’s grabbing and swiping horrors move unexpectedly, snatching and swiping at you while you miss shot after shot in fright.
Shooting them in the head will just stun them for a second or two, allowing you to slip by, but you’ll need to fire them a few more times until their cranium explodes to ensure they don’t get up again. You can even go for the limbs: a couple of pistol bullets is enough to snap off an ankle, making it much less mobile and allowing you to gently skirt around it. Even if you scuff a shot, it will still rip a chunk of flesh off your victim, giving horrific gravity to every used cartridge. Oh, and if you need some ammo, check out our Resident Evil 2 locker codes guide for some freebies.
Fighting conventional zombies gets old quickly in other Resident Evil games, but they remain a continuous threat throughout the Resident Evil 2 Remake campaign, and bringing them down always feels squelchy and satisfying in equal proportion. As Chris mentioned in our Resident Evil 2 Remake review, this is a carnage to be enjoyed, at least until the Resident Evil Village release date, when the extraordinarily tall Lady Dimitrescu opens her home gates to visitors.
A future version by legendary modded ZombieAli replaces Resident Evil 2’s frightening Mr X with the similarly nasty goose protagonist in the indie game Untitled Goose Game.
Call Of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War
To be honest, you could add any of Treyarch’s Call of Duty games to this list because their zombie horde modes are unrivaled. Black Ops 4 has a really good zombies mode, but we’ve chosen Black Ops Cold War because it’s a fantastic starting place for those who haven’t played zombies mode before.
It also features a new story, excellent tutorials, a plethora of easter eggs, and the original map is substantially easier for the classic survivor modes. There’s still much to get your teeth into, and feedback from those who have played it has been more favourable than in previous installments.
The World War Z
Given that the spiritual sequel to Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood, is still some months away, a new game that precisely adheres to the L4D series’ premise of co-op zombie battling will have to serve.
World War Z doesn’t add anything new to that concept, but it’s still a lot of fun to play through its gauntlet-style campaign scenarios with pals, upgrade your gear over time, and witness rotting corpses explode under heavy machine gun fire. It’s also a smashing success, with over 2 million copies sold through the Epic Games Store since its release.
State Of Decay 2
If you’re searching for a story, the original State of Decay is your best bet; nonetheless, the sequel does an amazing job of fleshing out the first game’s features to allow for a more fulfilling open-world survival experience.
State of Decay 2 is an online option of a zombie game that plays like an RPG and first surprises with its permadeath. You will select a protagonist from your community of survivors and send them out into the wilderness to acquire the food, fuel, or medications needed to keep the others alive. Once they’ve fallen asleep at home – or succumbed to the undead – you can take control of another individual from your base, each with their own background, personality, and combat abilities.
When you accept another stranger into your expanding base, you are accepting another playable character; another fresh story to create a middle and a conclusion to.
Killing Floor 2
One of the best co-op and zombie games on PC — that is not an exaggeration. Left 4 Dead 2 — Killing Floor 2 is a chaotic, frenzied rush in which you blow off undead brains while listening to rowdy heavy metal.
Killing Floor 2 is a terrific pick-up-and-play co-op title because zombies of all kinds and sizes attack you thick and fast. However, as you dedicate more time to zombie slaying, Killing Floor 2 transforms into a zombie game with a compelling strategy element: do you waste your blood-soaked resources now, or preserve them for a harsher future confrontation?
Most crucially, Killing Floor 2’s gameplay feels amazing to play with friends as a wonderfully brutal shooter – and its best mechanic was only added at the last minute, too.
Dying Light
Techland capitalized on Dead Island’s runaway – shuffle-away? – success with another open-world zombie game complete with configurable melee weapons and four-player co-op. And, for the first hour, they appear to be cut from the same cloth, providing focused busywork. Dying Light then stuffs that cloth into a bottle, lights it on fire, and throws it from a tremendous height onto a pack of undead.
Dying Light, like its survivors in a post-epidemic world, is a scavenger. Its map symbols and diversions are lifted directly from the Ubisoft template. Mirror’s Edge inspired the parkour. The clambering, on the other hand, informs every other facet of the game, transforming it into an explorative, emergent experience. Ignore the more repetitious missions and head to Harran’s rooftops, which were designed with vertical meandering in mind.
Despite the fact that they were working with borrowed parts, Techland created one of the best zombie games in Dying Light, which is why we’re so enthusiastic for the sequel. The narrative depth promised by Dying Light 2’s factions system is interesting, with a tale written by the famous Chris Avellone.
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