Top 10 Post Apocalyptic Games of All Time

We are all enamored by the end of the world. There is something titillating in the idea that everything we know and love will be destroyed, and that we will have to start civilization anew. Why do we fantasize so much about being reduced to barbarism, even when simple conveniences like toilets or clean running water are gone? Why do so many people want to experience something that were it to happen in real life they wouldn’t survive a week?

Maybe it’s the "what if" factor of seeing humanity rise and fall after staring into the face of total oblivion. Maybe it’s just the desire to end inequality for a few minutes before everyone races to stand on top of one another. Or maybe it’s perverse desire to see people and systems you don’t like completely obliterated from the world.

Video games are unique in their ability to place us within a world, within conditions far outside ordinary life. We can walk the barren apocalypse, see our world broken in a virtual "what if" and discover our reaction to it all. The game puts us in a situation where the world has ended, and we get to experience what happens after the disaster. Looking at it from that point of view here are the top 10 post-apocalyptic video games of all time.

10. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

I personally feel the game is lacking in several departments and is weak as a whole, but I put it on the list for two major reasons. Firstly, it feels like a post-apocalyptic game nearly the whole way through, because it is so empty. There are no living people anywhere. The ruins are empty, the village is empty, even the slaver airship had only three people on it and one died while the other two were the main characters. The second reason is that it presents a very different world than every other post-apocalyptic game on this list, which are all uniformly some shade of brown, this one is a lot more colorful. Civilization wasn’t so much indiscriminately destroyed, but rather the people were removed and nature was allowed to reclaim everything.

9. Darksiders

The end of the world is nigh in this Legend of Zelda-like game, except the powers that be say that there was a mix-up and it wasn’t suppose to happen… yet. So, as the literal embodiment of war, you are sent around to beat the angels and demons off our mortal plane and set things right. It’s post-apocalyptic, but only just. The apocalypse happened right before you stepped on the stage, but there isn’t a whole lot happening with everyone being dead and all and you’re around to pick up the pieces. I give the game props for creating an expansive world on its way to all holy hell and letting you run loose in it as the guy who probably caused it—it's kind of like making a child pick up after he had a temper tantrum.

8. Fuel

This open world racing game is set in a world ravaged by extreme weather fueled by global warming. (Insert your own joke here.) You encounter tornadoes and dust storms all across one of the largest maps in gaming, covering roughly the same square mileage as Connecticut. You traveling the map in fast cars, but the even so the sheer size of everything is crushing. Seeing a wasteland with everything destroyed or gone is one thing seeing keep going and going hammers it home. Existing in such a massive empty space conveys the result of utter destruction than anything else could. The game comes with a large selection of vehicles, lots of story races, even more challenges found through exploration of the world and most of all vista points, giving you picturesque views of the desolate landscape.

7. Resistance (series)

Resistance is another series where the end of the world has just happened and you step onto the scene just in time to shoot some monsters—but not soon enough to prevent them from devouring the population or whatever it was they ended up doing with the civilians. The Chimera may have started in Russia, but at the start of the first game they have made it to England and despite Nathan Hale’s best efforts in the second game they’ve crashed into the Americas. You could say that the over the various titles you see the transformation of a world into a post-apocalyptic world. The end of the series is where the world begins to settle into the standard story of the last few remaining humans trying to survive in the blasted hellscape that we know the genre for. It’s fighting against the inevitable.

6. Gears of War (series)

With most of the focus on the war against the Locust and the bromance of the main characters, we seem to forget how royally screwed the human race is in this series. Marcus is even congratulated at the end of the first game for blowing up a significant portion of the planet. A world that has devolved to a point where destroying large chunks of a planet are A-OK, I think counts as post-apocalyptic. No matter where Marcus and crew seem to go it’s always in ruins. We know for a fact that there are civilians, but the situation is even worse for them than it is for the military. There is so much that is disgusting and horrible about their lives I don’t want to get into it here. A great game series set in a place I’d never want to visit.

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