In society today there are smartphones which are basically computers and no limit to the media people can consume. Gaming technology is only getting better and the internet keeps people connected from all around the globe. Now imagine that all of that came to an end and most small comforts were near impossible to find. Welcome to the post-apocalyptic world.
Whether it’s a natural disaster, disease, or the fault of human nature, there’ve been plenty of games that let players experience what a world after the fall of technology would be like. Here are the 10 Best Post-Apocalyptic Video Games Ever, Ranked.
10 Darksiders 3
The Darksiders series takes a more biblical interpretation of the post-apocalypse and features The Four Horsemen. In the first game, War is framed for starting the apocalypse early and wiping out all of humankind, and the second was a prequel. Darksiders 3 has players control Fury, as she traverses the post-apocalyptic Earth to defeat the Seven Deadly Sins. Quite a few of the places Fury travels through are dilapidated cities, overrun with creatures and slowly being reclaimed by nature. Darksiders 3 takes place during the same time as the second one, so a few human survivors remain.
9 Horizon Zero Dawn
A post-apocalyptic game with a theme of the world being taken over by machines, Horizon Zero Dawn is set in the 31st century, where humans live in scattered tribe-like communities. The world is mostly inhabited by large robotic creatures called “machines”.
Players take control of Aloy, as she works to uncover the reason behind the “Derangement” a phenomenon that turned the once peaceful machines into more aggressive and dangerous ones. Aloy can hunt and tame the animal-like machines, using parts she salvages from them to craft things like weapons, ammo, health items and traps.
8 Rage
The Mad Max movies are probably what a lot of people think the world will develop into once society crumbles. And Rage is the perfect game for anyone that enjoys that vision. Players tale control Nicholas Raine, a soldier who wakes up from a cryogenic hibernation 106 years after the Earth was struck by an asteroid, making it into a wasteland.
Survivors live in settlements and are under the threat of mutants and bandit clans. Rage is a first-person-shooter, where players can fight enemies using an arsenal of customizable weapons and race around the open-world wasteland.
7 The Walking Dead
There are plenty of games that feature zombies as the reason for the apocalypse but Telltale’s The Walking Dead sets itself above most of them. In Season One, players take control of Lee Everett as he leads a rag-tag group of survivors making their way through a Walker infested Georgia, seeking shelter and safety.
The main focus of the game isn’t combat, but the choices that players make. Throughout the game, players will be meet with decisions through dialogue and quick-time events that affect the rest of the game and can lead to some potentially devastating consequences.
6 Nier: Automata
Nier Automata is the sequel to NieR, which is a spinoff of the Drakengard series. Following the future of one of the possible endings in NieR, the game is about a post-apocalyptic world where androids and machine fight in a proxy war between the remnants of humankind and otherworldly invaders.
The game starts off from the perspective of the android 2B as she and another android 9S work to clear out a machine threat. The open-world game switches between different perspectives have 26 possible endings, each named after a letter of the alphabet.
5 State Of Decay 2
Another post-apocalyptic zombie game, State of Decay 2 takes a different spin on the genre. Players won’t just fight against hordes of zombies, the game also focuses on building a fully functional community.
Players can take on the role of characters who have randomly generated looks, personality, and skills. Players have to both work to maintain their community (recruiting the right people, expanding it, supplying it with resources, etc) and to eliminate the zombie threat by taking out Plague Hearts. The game brings a bit of realism to it, once a character dies they’re gone for good.
4 The Last Of Us
In The Last of Us, the post-apocalyptic world is brought on by an outbreak of a mutated parasitic fungus turning humans into aggressive cannibalistic creatures called the Infected. The story follows Joel who is a smuggler, who ends up escorting a girl named Ellie who just might be the key to developing a cure.
The world of The Last of Us is gritty where the survivors fight every day just to stay alive. Ammunition is limited and often players will find themselves either crafting weapons or make do with things like bricks.
3 Far Cry: New Dawn
Far Cry: New Dawn is the spinoff of Far Cry 5 and takes place 15 years after the events that happened in the game. While it isn’t required to have played Far Cry 5, it adds another layer of enjoyment to see the return of several characters and what has become of Hope County.
Players help survivors of the new community, Prosperity, against the threat of the Highwaymen a gang of organized bandits. The bright vibrant plant life and the Afropunk design of the Highwaymen give New Dawn a pretty distinct feel to most other post-apocalyptic games.
2 Dying Light
Parkour has never been as awesome as it is portrayed in the zombie post-apocalyptic world of Dying Light. Players take on the role of Kyle Crane, an undercover agent tasked with infiltrating the city of Harran to find a stolen file taken by rogue political figure Rais.
Harran has been quarantined to keep the aggressive zombie-like infected inside, but it’s inhabited by non-infected survivors who use parkour to travel through the city. Players progress through the story completing missions that take them to different areas, and they battle against the infected and Rais’ thugs, using crafted weapons.
1 Fallout 4
No list of post-apocalyptic games would be complete without one of the Fallout games. The list could have been filled with just titles from the series (except Fallout 76), but Fallout 4 feels like one of the best out of the series.
Players take on the role of a Vault Dweller, an inhabitant of one of the underground fallout shelters built in response to a global nuclear war. Fallout 4 has some of the most memorable NPCs of the series and the best combat system and the best open world, set in post-apocalyptic Boston.
NEXT: 10 Post Apocalyptic Video Games To Play If You Love Fallout (Or If You’re Still Made About Fallout 76)
