Yeah we love them, but stop reproducing the same old stuff.

Ever since Zombie Zombie and The Evil Dead back in 1984 people have always gained some sort of strange satisfaction from zombie shooters that no other game genre has ever been able to offer. Whether it be that you’re mowing down hordes of flesh hungry zombies with just yourself and your gun or whether it’s the exploding limbs and endless replay value that these games provide.

Killing Floor

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising saw the growth in popularity of zombie games when it was released even though the concept of Left 4 Dead was based upon the game Killing Floor which is based on an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod. Either way, both games opened up the zombie massacre genre to the masses.

The idea of killing zombies also jumped on the more traditional first person shooters when Treyarch announced that it would include a co-op and multi-player mini-game called Nazi Zombies in Call of Duty: World at War. In Nazi Zombies player have to barricade themselves and try to prevent against an inevitable zombie ridden death.

2009 saw the release of the arena based zombie shooter Burn Zombie Burn, released as a downloadable game on the PlayStation Store, which gained much praise for its unique scoring system. This then lead to the zombie shooter genre being thrust forward onto the digital retail world.

This is when the market began to become heavily saturated with almost near solid copies of other zombie shooters. Zombie Apocalypse was released in late 2009 and basically has the same overhead arena based gameplay that Burn Zombie Burn had except with a few tweaks and a dulled down user interface. Then came Zombie Driver, a game which stuck with the same overhead type camera angle that the previous games had but instead of you playing as a trapped civilian you were and car and had to charge through endless waves of zombies to try to get to survivors. Zombie Wranglers appeared on the Xbox Live Marketplace for a very cheap price which highlighted why the game was so crap.

Dead Nation

Dead Horde

Moving away from the titles which start with the word ‘zombie’ are games such as Dead Nation which was released in 2010 and is basically a solid copy of Zombie Apocalypse. Now there’s Dead Horde for the PC which once seems to be a copy of Dead Nation combined with the vehicle elements of Zombie Driver.

The word ‘zombie’ is starting to be completely overused is the game titles along with the gameplay. Someone needs to come up with a fresh new zombie game which should have unique gameplay and not just the same old ‘apocalypse’ setting.

That being said, if a zombie apocalypse did happen, I’d say we’d all be more than capable of dealing with them due to all the repetitive gameplay we’ve had over the past few years.

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