There are some things that just go together very well. Peanut butter and jelly. Salt and caramel. Books and comfortable armchair. Zombies and survival games. All natural companions, better together than they are apart.
Leaving food and comfort aside for the moment, let’s consider that last example of perfect compatibility.
Base-building games
There is a strong relation between zombie-themed media and hectic home improvement projects. Instead of painting the walls and fixing the wiring, however, they tend to involve fortifying windows with boards, setting up furniture barricades, and using leftover razor wire on broken-off table legs to have a perfect way to welcome the shambling guests when they poke their heads through the door.
This happens to align perfectly with the survival games, especially ones with crafting systems involving structural engineering commonly referred to as “base building”. Building forts is humanity’s favored activity, just give any child a blanket and a few firm pillows and you’ll see. This primal drive to build invulnerable shelters translated well into gaming, and when the era of turtling-friendly real-time strategies ended, survival-oriented action games picked up the slack.
There are many examples of this phenomenon, both with and without zombies, and if you were to browse the Survival games category on G2A.COM you’d find so many great digital products that your gaming backlog would weep (unlike your budget).
But to keep things on track, let’s prove our point with a few top-tier games which feature survival, base building, and ravenous zombies keen on testing your defenses and munching on your brain.
Build a fort tonight
One of the most pitch-perfect representatives of this combined genre is 7 Days to Die, which, incidentally, is finally getting its full release after the decade or so it spent in Early Access. The premise is simple enough: you’re a person who has to survive in a fictional county in Arizona, ruined by World War Three. Find food, build shelter, deal with zombies which might be just loitering during the day, but turn aggressive and hangry at night, you know, typical post-apo survival stuff.
However, every 7 days you have to contend with a horde of the undead and frenzied animals swarming to your location hoping to munch on you. The day/night cycle and a seven-day timer provide an easy to settle into rhythm. Scavenge and explore during the day, prepare for nightly attacks by improving your home base, and spend the week prepping for the major assault. It’s a compelling loop, and over the decade of EA 7 Days to Die polished it as much as possible, so don’t wait to long to grab a copy for yourself!
Another option you could look at is a little game called “Fortnite”. Yes, indeed. Fortnite. While the Battle Royale is the version of Fortnite that truly made the splash, that’s not where the game originated. It began as a base-building zombie-defense game now known as Fortnite: Save the World. Overshadowed by the arrival of the Battle Royale genre it faded into obscurity, but you can still play it! It’s a pretty good option if you want a more lighthearted take on this genre.
If you don’t, and are interested in something larger in scale than 7DtD, then you should turn your search lights toward State of Decay 2, a game not just about building a base, but about building a community of survivors. In addition to making your safe compound self-sufficient, you’ll also recruits NPCs to help you out within and without the safe perimeter. And help you will need, because this recently-postapocalyptic world is full of hungry zombies of various kinds, and having a buddy can make or break your expedition.
State of Decay 2 is on the more strategy side-however, and while it does feature co-op and robust construction, perhaps you’d like something friendlier, with more emergent gameplay. In that case perhaps… Minecraft? Mojang’s massive hit is famous for its crafting, but the core game is actually a survival. Zombies (in several versions based on biome) spawn in the dark, which makes light sources and a safe haven quite useful, if you don’t want to skip the night by sleeping it away.
Unshakeable foundations
Of course, the games above do not exhaust the genre. Especially if you expand your definition of a zombie to, say, frenzied mutants, or are open to different genres, you can find plenty of potential candidates.
If you choose to get them on the G2A.COM marketplace, you are not only going to enjoy instant delivery. You can also save a significant amount of money, perhaps even enough to treat yourself to two or three extra games, instead of making the hard choice of picking just the one that can fit within your budget. With handy filters and a rich catalogue of game key deals, you’re certain to find plenty of titles to your liking.
Which is great, if your taste for devising fortifications strong enough to resist a ravenous horde is too diverse for any single game to satisfy this irresistible craving for fun.
Back