Zombie Games
It’s The Zombie Apocalypse. Let’s Play!
Headshot! There’s nothing quite like great zombie games. Facing an uncountable horde of relentless enemies who will challenge even the coolest of heads is one of the greatest thrills that gaming has to offer. Facing zombies alone is a trial of your stamina and guile. Facing them with a team feels like a true test of your human ingenuity and team spirit.
The Undying Appeal of The Undead
For thousands of years, storytellers from all around the world have been scaring their audiences with tales of the reanimated dead walking the Earth. The word comes from Haitian folklore, where it was used to describe a cadaver animated by dark magic, usually voodoo. The word and the idea entered the English language in the early twentieth century through horror and pulp novels and quickly captured our imaginations.
It wasn’t until a few decades ago that the modern zombie, as we know it, came to be. Mid-century zombie movies set out the basic lore for the modern zombie. Zombies were undead, mindless creatures that, like all great horror characters, involve an inversion of normal life — the dead eating the living — that fills you with dread.
Zombies were supernatural at first, as you’d expect from a horror character. Later movies and games have introduced different reasons for them existing, many of which fit well with the science-fiction genre of their stories. It might be a virus accidentally set loose by a government. It might be a random mutation in a farm animal. It might be the work of an evil wizard. What really matters, however, is that zombies are hungry for human flesh — and you better not let them bite you!
The Zombies of The World of Video Games
Most zombie games are horror games simply because they feature zombies! Beyond that they may have more differences than similarities. Many of them are survival horror, which is a natural fit when you think about the nature of zombies as an enemy — they will never stop coming, so you always need to keep an eye on your ammunition, even if it seems like you have plenty of bullets right now!
Many others are essentially straight-up action games where you, perhaps in the company of one or more buddies, smash your way through wave after wave of slathering undead, often using outlandish weaponry like chainsaws, gatling guns or ride-on lawnmowers. Zombies suit that kind of game equally well — they feel pulpy enough that the game can contain wild elements without throwing you out of the story.
That’s just scratching the surface because zombie games come in so many more flavors than just those main ones;
- Tower defense games like Popcap’s Plants vs Zombies, perhaps the most successful zombie mobile game of recent years, which pits homeowners against the undead horde. Using only gardening skills, players have to repel wave after wave of shambling zombies. The game proved an enormous hit, and proved that zombies are still a huge part of pop culture, all these decades later.
- First person shooters — Shooter games started including “zombie” modes back in 2010 and they were a huge hit, becoming fan favorites and bringing in a whole new demographic to the genre. Now, there’s rarely a shooter game that doesn’t have a substantial zombie element for at least part of its release. In the shooter-space, zombies are here to stay!
- Recently, the genre has become more mature with narrative-focused offerings like The Last of Us and The Walking Dead setting a new bar for cinematic storytelling, impeccable immersion and narrative excellence. Given its impact on zombie stories in comics, TV and games, you could definitely make a case for The Walking Dead as a franchise being the single biggest update to zombie folklore in many generations.
- Co-op shooters — Zombies are, of course, the perfect enemy for an asymmetric shooter, especially one where co-op is encouraged. Games like Left 4 Dead were a very shrewd appeal to the under-served “couch co-op” market and skillfully blended elements from much of modern zombie lore to create a world that fans loved.
- Cowboy games! Even Red Dead Redemption, an otherwise pretty grounded game world, got in on the zombie action with its Undead Nightmare DLC, and the tonal match was so good that it spawned a little sub-genre of Western spookiness.
Zombies can go in pretty much any type of game that developers want to put them in and they always seem to work. In real life, as in fiction, zombies are here in huge numbers and they will wear you down eventually!
Zombie Games Here on GamePix
Given the long-term infatuation we have with zombies in games, it’s only natural that we here at GamePix wanted to gather together a brain-eatingly amazing array of zombie games. Here you will find a selection of zombie games quite unlike anything you can find elsewhere. We have every flavor and kind of zombie game you can possibly imagine! Pages and pages of excellent online zombie games for you to try.
The best part? Because this is GamePix, all of our zombie browser games, like every other kind of browser game here on the site, are one hundred percent free-to-play. They won’t cost you a nickel, no matter how many you play or how long you play for. They also work on any device, no matter what kind of browser you use. You can play them anywhere, anytime, for free. All you need is a device with a screen and an internet connection.
Lock and load. Those zombies have no idea what’s in store for them.
FAQs
Are there any free zombie games?
Every single one of our zombie games is totally free-to-play and we have an absolutely massive range for you to choose from. Here you’ll find hundreds of zombie browser games, ranging from serious horror fare to the silliest of cartoony fun. All of them are playable for as long as you like at no cost at all to you. Headshotting the undead has never been so cheap! It’s also never been so convenient — all of our zombie games, like every other online game here on GamePix, work with any browser and on any device without anything needing to be downloaded, installed or updated. That means you can sock it to the shuffling brain-eaters anytime, anywhere — all you need is a screen and an internet connection.
Are zombie games fun?
Of course they are! Zombie games wouldn’t have been so popular for so long if they weren’t a ridiculous amount of fun to play! Let’s face it, a lot of us quite enjoy fighting things in games, but it feels much less questionable to fight zombies than it does people, or even aliens. You can shoot zombies all day without every starting to second guess yourself. Zombies also really suit the format of a lot of video games and make for a really fun antagonist. They’re about as much fun as you can have!
