Too many Zombie Games? (Personal Opinion)

It was Angry Joe who first brought this to my attention with his Dying Light review. I didn't pay much attention to it but after E3 I've definitely noticed it.

At E3, there was Dead Rising 4, State of Decay 2 and Days gone. I might be missing some others. And on top of that people really wanted a The Last Of Us 2.

This must be fantastic if you love zombie games to have such constant supply. Personally I find the zombie game market has become oversaturated, and it kills all interest for me in the game. I saw Days Gone and I just thought 'meh'. I feel like that developers may have become overdependent on the zombie troupe.

I'm wrong though. All those games mentioned will sell very well. I'd just like to see some innovation.

Zombies are still really popular. Zombie games sell and zombies in general sell.

The Walking Dead is one of the biggest shows on TV.

I love zombie games

I'd say there are too many war games, way more than zombie games.

Zombies games are a way to do a PC natural disaster.

How about games with guns, why so many? /joke

If you don't like games with Zombies? How about you don't buy them. It's the same as complaining about Demons, Wizards, Aliens, Dragons, and other fiction gibberish.

From my understanding if you think it's too much, it's because you don't care for it. Just move on.

*On that, The Last of Us doesn't have Zombies, >Mutants< dude!! I don't get some gamers, they said Resident Evil 4 had Zombies, when it was Parasites (Ganados). And The Evil Within had Haunted (which in Japan was called Yurei) which refers to a tainted spirit, which implies a supernatural entity. These ignorant gamers like Angry Jo apparently crave originality, but upright say everything is the same out of stupidity, the level of silliness is beyond me -___-

All industries go through trends, the gaming industry is no different then music and movies.

You don't have to play them all. Only game I've played with zombies was The Walking Dead. There are so many games out there without zombies, so...

I don't mean to sound critical of people who enjoy these games. I just wanted to see other people's thoughts!

You mentioned like 3 new zombie games. Without much effort I can think of a dozen games with aliens in the past few months. There aren't too many zombie games. People just whine too much.

@themanofpears: There is too much Zombie everything. Not just games. I find that Zombie is the N. American fallback on everything. When in doubt its always Zombies.

Think about how many shows, movies fallback to its "Zombies" plotline. SPOILER ALERT.

Besides the known Zombie shows and movies, like Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, IZombie, World War Z, and etc, You have, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Maze Runner (Yes it turns out be Zombies), Game of Thrones (White walkers aka Zombies), Wayward Pines (humanity evolves into Zombies), The Strain (Yes, its another Zombie show), etc, etc, etc.

It would seem to me that simplest most basic plotline of all N. American media is, blame it on the Zombies. No matter how complex things may start, aka Maze Runner, Wayward Pines, somehow the answer always falls back to Zombies. I think its just American culture in general, not gaming.

@kazeswen:

Totally agree.

While I agree that there are probably too many zombies games lately, despite that, I also feel that there has not yet been a definitive zombie game experience. Every zombie game that has been released thus far has been missing something to prevents it from being a definitive zombie game experience, so I keep looking forward to new zombie games in hope that one of them will finally deliver that definitive zombie game experience that I have been looking for.

@MarcRecon: "Why are all these damn kids running in a Maze?"

"Humanity has turned into Zombies an we need strapping young boys and girls to run around in a maze to find a cure.....Ok (Only in America)

@kazeswen: The Strain (Yes, its another Zombie show)

...having read the books, they're vampires. Zombies don't get killed by sunlight or silver or form secret hit squads that drive around in black vans and apparently have no trouble crossing bodies of water (City of the Dead). They also don't hatch world domination conspiracies with billionaires.

to the OP, games with zombies can still be innovative. That's not really the issue. The issue is the lack of creativity in using them. It's similar to the nuclear apocalypse vision that always seems to look like Mad Max or Fantasy that tends to look like Tolkien. Devs just need to learn there's not just one way to do this.

I would also say to you that Dead Rising, Last of Us, Left for Dead and TellTale's the Walking Dead are all very different games, so singling them out as lacking diversity just because they all have zombies is unfair.

Well, I thought that Dying Light really captured the essence of a true zombie holocaust.

Too many Zombie games, yet only 1 or 2 are good ones and IMO none of them are great or excellent in recent memory.

I'd say there are many Zombie games, but just a limited amount that's actually good.

Lots of zombie games but honestly, how many really good zombie games are there?

I agree with OP. When they announced Days Gone I was like "Why would I care about this?" Doesn't bother me, but I'm not going to buy it.

Yeah, I think that there's been an oversaturation of zombies in pop culture for at least 10-15 years. If anything, movies and TV are even worse about zombies than games are.

Not that I think there should be less of it. After all, if fans like the stuff then why not make it? But for me, I'm just sick of zombies and have been for years. Aside from a few exceptions, it's gotten to the point where I'll actively avoid something once I find out that it has zombies in it. Someone will be like, "did you hear about this new thing? It's about zombies and....", and then I'll just say, "no thanks, I'm not interested."

@MrGeezer: Likewise, I generally get very upset when something that didn't feel like it was Zombies ends up being Zombies. I stopped watching Maze Runner when I found out that it was another Zombie flick, I literally walked out on the second film as soon as the Zombies showed up I asked for my money back, also I didn't watch Wayward Pines cause I heard it turns out to be about humanity evolving into Zombies.

When something is over saturated it can be a drag. It also ruins what may have been good stories. I think both Maze Runner and Wayward Pines could have been really great stories if the writers didn't fallback to the old Zombie plotline.

I'm completely with you on that, I avoid all things Zombies nowadays. Sad thing is I remember back in the days when Zombie flicks were few and far between and things like 28 Days Later really got me excited.

I agree. There are a bit too much for my liking. Thats why I am going to skip ALL of them.

Days gone and The Last of Us dont have zombies in them.

While I do love the anti-hero biker-gang vibe I get from Days Gone and The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time, I do wish the people at Bend Studios had done some more Independence Day alien styled concept, could have still had the hording tech on display but just something to differentiate it MORE-SO from the overfilled Zombie styled games. Most games that feature extra-terrestrials are set in space (aka Dead Space or Killzone or whatever…)

@Flubbbs: They act like zombies, they instill the same "fear". Brain dead ennemy that can't be stopped unless you destroy the head. They also eat flesh ...

They are zombies

The games creators have said they arent zombies so no, they arent zombies.

@Flubbbs: They say that to avoid the backlash of another zombie game which it is.

Yeah I've been over Zombie (and Zombie-like) games for a while... that's why I wasn't really impressed with the Days Gone trailer.

@Coco_pierrot: I'm sure you also think Super Mutants in Fallout are Zombies as well with your above logic, and that must be cool to think everything is the same. . .

First of all "fear" is subjective and not restricted to the concept of the Walking Undead.

Zombie is a movable sack of rotten flesh with no sense of awareness, because they're not just stupid, they're dead. If it doesn't fit this? It's not a Zombie.

Cannibals eat people, and they're not Zombies, Ghouls are Incorporeal, so are not Zombies. And Mutants are just modified creatures with a taste for meat, not a Zombie.

If this didn't open your eyes even slightly? Join Angry Jo in ignorance.

@RSM-HQ: In Fallout 3 you had feral Ghouls which is close to Zombies but no, not in this case.

The case of TLOU is, the fungus infection turn human into Zombies, brain-dead flesh eating monster and they also rotten and turn into mushroom after a while.

RE4 to me didn't have Zombies in it and it is one of the thing that turned RE4 into a nice action game but not a RE game.

@Coco_pierrot: i dont think you understand what a zombie is.. They would have to die and reanimate to be considered a zombie. The infected in TLoU are humans that have been infected with a parasitic fungus that go through different stages and eventually die. The freakers in Days Gone are alive also and are pretty much like the people infected with rage in 28 days later.

I'm with coco here. You can say all you want how the monsters in 28 Days Later were "infected', but they were zombies. 28 Days Later was a zombie movie. For all practical purposes, the monsters acted like zombies. Stating that they're not zombies over nitpicks like "they starve eventually if they don't eat" and "you don't have to shoot them in the brain to kill them" is like stating that a movie doesn't have vampires if the movie's vampires aren't weak against garlic and holy water.

You're allowed to tweak a monster. That's precisely why there are vampires in fiction that can touch the cross and eat garlic. Similarly, "infected, not dead" is just an explanation for a zombie's existence and does not in any way mean that for all practical purposes it isn't still a zombie. No, explaining away the zombie apocalypse in 28 Days Later most certainly does NOT mean that it isn't a zombie movie.

Yes, the gaming market is heavily oversaturated with zombie games and they aren't even very good enemies. It's a boring concept. It sucks in all media, movies, television, comics, books, and video games. I'm so tired of zombies. I can't stand it anymore. And saying "oh they are afflicted with the rage virus" or "they aren't really zombies" is baloney. The problem is the enemy type, not their origin. The problem is the boring zombie behavior, not what name the generic monster type has.

I would say there is a lot of zombie games but different types. For example dead rising and left 4 dead are both zombie games but very different in how they play.

People act like all zombie games are the same but most of em play so differently that they can't even really be compared to each other.

@kazeswen: When did the Strain become about Zombies? I only watched the first few episodes, but when I did so it was about Vampires.

I think Zombie games are part what I consider "survival" genre games. It does seem like it's getting harder to sustain interest in these games. I do see more people interested in fun and playful games and veering away from the intense apocalyptic genres.

We need more BUG games...you know, invasion like the Zerg, those bugs in Starship Troopers, Tyranids from 40k?

I take that over Zombie games anytime (i love Zomebie games though).

Too many zombie games? So what? I personally don’t like zombie games, because it is too mainstream and I want something new. I know Resident Evil, the zombies were slow and predictable (don’t count such thing as Nemesis). But then there come Dead Rising, where zombies are so f*cking many and I don’t have all the bullets to put in their head. Then there’s Dying Light, when I realize it was scary to wandering in the night where we cannot see all those zombies, and they can climb too.

But I like state of decay, it taught us to care with other people and not simply easy to trust people in that kind of situation. Gameplay were simple, Graphics were meh, Story were too predictable but I like when the game want us to build society from zero.

I got bored with Last of Us, Dying Light or even Days Gone. I just my taste that is different. I agree there are tons of zombies games out there, but one of ‘em could teach us how to survive when it happens. Right?

@chitosan87: I think the best way to learn to survive IF it ever comes is to learn some survival skills like hunting, shelter building etc, not playing a game.

@themanofpears: zombie games aren't as popular as when L4D, L4D2 and other survival games were back at that time.

Saying there're 2 sequels and a new title - doesn't mean zombie games are popular.

@themanofpears: Agree,, I just learnt the basic from boy scouts and mountain community, but none of them teach me how to fight zombie and craft a weapon. LOL

You just noticed? The trend began over a decade ago.

I LOOOOVE zombie games...what they need to stop doing is releasing sports games year after year, at least with most zombie games theres some kind of new innovation instead of just cranking out the same game year after year

I have Dying Light installed still, still a damn good game. I played State of Decay and Dead Rising 3 before it. Not too much of a problem, I just dont buy every zombie game I see.