Zombie Survival clones

 When there's no more room in hell, the survival games will walk across Steam new Releases...

Yet again a new zombie game has entered the crowded pantheon of it's peers and distinguished itself soundly as a product of quality and inspiration, and once again it's a title from the tenured Resident Evil franchise. But, surprisingly, it's not a zombie game created in the most popular moulds of this genre. As one might expect from the highest regarded zombie franchise in the world. Rather, being action adventure story-based games, RE is actually an anomaly on the board of zombie games, most of which focus themselves towards the tried and true method of the 'survival' formula. Those of us who have been around this industry for a while remember the days when every single popular game for a few months had some sort of tacked-on zombie component. And 'The Day Before' developers probably never grew out of that period with the rest of us.

Now, straight away it's probably fair to let you all know my feelings on Survival games. I don't like them. No sir, they are not my friend and I have nothing positive to report about their contents or presentations because I think the entire genre is guided by lose assumptions more than heavily explored rules. I think survival games struggle with resource management issues that get in the way of having fun instead of providing examples to heighten it- and I think the spate of Zombie games with survival elements are what helped make the genre into such a cliché. Because let's be honest... zombie games aren't really all that 'high brow' are they? They all demand a single type of enemy usually, with very basic 'chase and kill' AI packages and an uninspired, typically sporadic, spawning algorithm. It ain't rocket science.

But to be fair, those games that did manage to last for a while and make something of themselves during the 'fad' ages do so because they had something special to do with their take on the formula. I think the only one which still has a presence today and didn't do anything intensely unique to stand out was probably '7 Days To Die', which boasted the gimmick of being hunted by particularly big hoards on the seventh day of every week. Of course, the game also grew it's aesthetic of 'slightly more realistic-looking Minecraft' with the robust building and crafting and the seemingly biome-based world generation; but in it's heart it was just another survival zombie game like all the others. 7 Days was just an earnest effort that it's team stuck with, rather than a flash in the pan idea that was abandoned before the week was out, like all the others.

One such title with a bit more meat to it's bones in the creativity department would be 'Project Zomboid', which refocused the idea of a zombie survival game by bringing players out to an isometric perspective and focusing on the minutiae of survival. Securing clean sources of water, cleaning cuts, managing colds. The motto of the game was 'This is how you die', and indeed the game was almost an instructional leaflet on all the ways a real life apocalypse could kill you, on top of the zombies roaming the land. Never the prettiest of games, Zomboid always impressed with the complexity of it's gameplay opportunities that fed into the 'story generating' ambiance that a game like this really need in order to stand out from the rest and make an impact. You can tell stories of survival in this game that no other survival game can spawn, and that in itself makes for a special experience.

I've always regarded 'State of Decay' as the 'polished' version of all those Steam dumpster fed zombie survival games that littered the survival age. Built in conjunction with Microsoft, as an Xbox console exclusive- State of Decay 1 bore itself on a promise of generated tales of survival and community management from the ground level. Kind of like playing your own season of the Walking Dead- you would pick the place of your base, scavenge for the right supplies to build the right facilities and deal with the threats that slowly built up around your door. Now State of Decay 2 was really the game that lived up to that promise, but both games in my mind still suffer from a very linear progression of gameplay. Most bases are just the same in all but location (2 added a little more functional variety, but not tons) community interaction doesn't drip with much flavour; but the idea of what these games wanted to be did propel it's community to smother over it's flaws. I think we're all just crossing our fingers and hoping that State of Decay 3 finally meets the dream we've all had.

And of course, there's the father of it all: DayZ. A mod for a popular realism based military tactical shooter game, DayZ would evolve into it's very own entity after experiencing a meteoric rise to success that eclipsed the original product. Standalone DayZ of today is a zombie survival experience renowned for its pretty much boundless PVP interaction in a huge world where everyone is hostile and your interactions with the everyman is always dynamic. Of course, at it's heart DayZ is just a PVP arena game with zombies and a ungainly huge map to shoot each other in. There's not really any objective to the game, and it's telling how the greatest evolution of this formula, the extraction shooter, (or perhaps even the BattleRoyale genre, at least in gameplay style) totally removed the zombies altogether. Some say that DayZ never quite figured out how to get it's zombies right, either making them too tough or too pathetic.

Who out there remembers RUST? The popular survival title about being a modern day cave man literally building their world from wood and rock. Well few people who know of that remember the days when it was original yet another zombie survival title! That's right, the wolves and bears of the land were briefly uninspired zombie models before the devs revealed just how primitive game zombies are by literally replacing them with equally as mindless animal counterparts. Oh, and then there's UNTURNED; another PVP tipped zombie survival game but with adorably retro-style block style characters and much more palette-able roam maps. And then there's- ah but we could be doing this forever, couldn't we?

You get my point, right? These types of games were a disease much more virulent and far-spreading than the zombie plagues they propose to depict, but in their absence I can't help but feel a tinge of irrational sentimentality towards that age. It was a particularly homogeneous time in game development, where dozens upon dozens of tiny studios were reiterating on the exact same ideas and concepts, making the exact same tiny breakthroughs and creating almost the exact same games, that the standout titles really felt like gladiatorial victories surviving a royale rumble of competitors. Like Mario surviving an age that forgot 'Gex the Gecko'. Still, I'd argue that between the every loved modern Resident Evil series and the really fun-seeming upcoming Dead Island 2- we're all in a much better place than we were with zombies 10 years ago.  Also, Happy Birthday me, I guess.