Arizona Sunshine

Zombies make marvelous antagonists. They’re plodding, dark parodies of society’s short-sightedness. They’re plentiful and emotionless eaters of flesh, which makes them perfect cannon fodder for action films and twitch shooters. Their wasted visages serve the purposes of both horror and humor with equal effectiveness. They’ve been a part of the video game landscape for decades, so long they’ve carved out their own subgenre: the "zombie game."<br><br> The still-shambling corpses of the damned have been important to some of gaming’s more notable narratives and innovations. These are the 25 best zombie games of all time.

<h3>25. Zombies Ate My Neighbors</h3> Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a bizarre and colorful SNES action game from the golden days of LucasArts. It’s a wickedly funny shooter that relies on adorable and bizarre animation for most of the laughs, and the delightful cartoon enemies are half the fun. Before the journey is over you’ll battle space bugs, save cheerleaders, leap on trampolines, and fight a giant baby. Beyond the garish trappings, it’s a very well-designed cooperative shooter that manages to find environmentally destructive uses for everything from squirt guns to rocket launchers. Since the main thrust of each level is rescuing civilians rather than defeating enemies, it also requires a lot more thought to finish than your average arcade-style game, a design innovation that adds a great deal to the challenge and replayability.

<h3>24. The House of the Dead</h3> Along with Resident Evil, this iconic on-rails arcade shooter helped restore zombies' pop culture relevance in the '90s and aid in the revival of the zombie film genre a decade later. In a 2013 interview with Paul Weedon, George A. Romero, long considered the father of zombie movies, credited House of the Dead and RE with popularizing modern zombies "more than anything else."

<h3>23. State of Decay 2</h3> The State of Decay series debuted as an Xbox Live Arcade game in 2013, and tackles the trials and tribulations of surviving and thriving among the undead. As such it’s a slower, more thoughtful apocalypse experience, though there’s no shortage of opportunities to satisfy your zombie bloodlust with a range of weapons and vehicles. The 2018 sequel built on the original’s zombie-sandbox premise by expanding in scope and adding four-player co-op while maintaining the near-constant tension that accompanies the threat of permadeath.

<h3>22. Zombi</h3> ZombiU (later released as Zombi) is a punishing first-person survival horror game set in a zombie-infested London. While it doesn’t possess the best narrative on this list, nor does it receive high marks for combat, its novel, roguelike approach to death makes it worth checking out. When you’re bitten, your character dies, permanently, and you come back as a new survivor who must track down your previous (now reanimated) body to retrieve lost items. This cyclical system of death and rebirth (and death again) is thematically fitting for a zombie game, and the necessary killing of your previous corpse cleverly wraps a blood-covered bow on your previous run. Meanwhile, survivor mode requires you to complete the entirety of Zombi with a single character (i.e., without dying). It’s among the most difficult challenges of survival available on this list.

<h3>21. Days Gone</h3> Days Gone’s open world is a post-apocalyptic playground on which you’re let loose with protagonist Deacon St. John’s rusty, trusty motorcycle and dozens of ways to (re)bury the undead. It was one of Sony’s less-celebrated exclusives from the PS4 era, yet it’s carved out a spot in the zombie-game pantheon thanks largely to its horde sequences. These encounters, of which there are 40, pit Deacon against up to 500 ‘freakers’ (Days Gone’s term for zombies) at once in a heart-pumping trial of quick wit and quicker reflexes.