5 Games for People Who Love a Good Apocalypse

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 provides a stark contrast to the events of the previous game in the series. Whereas the apocalypse was just getting started in Half-Life, Half-Life 2 sees Gordon Freeman waking up from 20 years of stasis to a different apocalyptic scenario: a world under the tight rule of the intergalactic empire known as the Combine. The Combine invaded during Gordon’s time out, slaughtering the world in just seven hours before humanity surrendered. Now, the Combine keeps the slowly-dying population under control through all sorts of menacing means: reproduction suppression, executions, raids, all the while draining Earth of its natural resources until it’s sucked dry. Add on top of all of that the wild, roaming aliens from the first game still prowling around Earth, and it makes Half-Life 2’s world look pretty bleak, especially in the face of such a huge adversary. With Gordon Freeman around, rallying a resistance, and the help of some alien friends, the future looks a little brighter; if only very, very slightly.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us starts us right at the beginning of the outbreak that sets off the apocalypse: a mutant strain of the Cordyceps fungus that ends up mutating humans into uncontrollable, vicious monsters. 20 years later (is this starting to look like a trend?), the world is living through it all, set in various settlements in quarantine zones looking to keep law and order up to check. Opposing the quarantine zones are a rebel group known as the Fireflies, who have their own agenda for what the world needs. And while these zones may be difficult to live in, the outside world is also filled with both looters, raiders, and the mutated humans themselves. While The Last of Us is a very brutal world filled with some very horrifying adversaries, we see later on in the game that it is re-growing, and nature is working its way back in; so not all is lost.

Gears of War

Gears of War, alongside Half-Life 2, features yet another apocalyptic scenario of humanity in a war against an alien species. Unlike Half-Life 2’s war against a rigid, alien-governed, authoritarian society, Gears of War’s war is a lot more messy, brutal, and dangerous. While it starts out not so great with a 79 year war between COG and the UIR, everything is made deadlier with the emergence of the the Locust from underground. The series sees the ongoing fight between the Gears and the Locust, with humanity just barely hanging on throughout it all. And, unlike the other two mentioned, it gets harder and harder to find happy places in these games, with the few being the camaraderie with Delta Team.

Metro

Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light depict Russia after it was obliterated by atomic bombs in a nuclear war. The war caused what was left of the population to retreat underground to the metro stations, setting up a whole society interconnected via tunnels. Meanwhile, the surface is quite literally a nuclear winter, hit hard by the post-apocalypse with nary a sign of human life. What makes Metro so brutal, and at the same time so unnerving, is not the nuclear war itself, or its implications, but the unknown. The series deals with the sort of stuff you would expect from a post-nuclear war: mutated creatures, and crazed survivors fighting for control. But at the same time, it also deals with more unknown factors. With the survivors in Moscow being so severely cut off from the rest of humanity, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on anywhere else, and at times, it leads to paranoia and encounters with strange phenomena that can’t be explained.

Fallout

The Fallout series has presented us with many games worth of huge, expansive open worlds, filled to the brim with locations and easter eggs. Fallout’s world was brought about due to a resource war between many of the world’s leading powers, which quickly escalated, bringing us the post-apocalypse that we know and love. Fallout 4 brought a new spin by starting us out just as the nuclear war began, giving us a brief glimpse at times before. What makes Fallout one of the more brutal post-apocalyptic games out there is due to its content. While the games themselves have quite a humorous spin on the post-apocalyptic life, the things you find and the people you encounter provide a darker undertone to such a world. Skeletons littered everywhere, all telling their own stories about what they were doing before being wiped out by the bombs. Some can be especially disturbing, and make you sit back and realize just how bleak and terrible this world can be. On top of this all, the world is filled with a very colorful cast of monsters, mutants, and robots, and that’s just the USA. What’s the world like in other places in the Fallout universe? A question to think about while you play it, if you haven’t already. Fallout manages to provide a blend of humor, violence, and evil, all set within a surprisingly dark apocalyptic backdrop.

This post was originally written by Tanner Fugate.