Whether it’s fighting a robotic uprising, scrounging for supplies while evading zombie hordes, or simply trying to survive the classic nuclear annihilation scenario, there’s something oddly compelling about life after the apocalypse. All that chaos doesn’t sound like much fun in reality, but hand us a controller and it can make for some of the very finest gaming experiences.
We chalk that up to the freedom you’re given to explore these open-world sandboxes. If civilisation has only just crumbled, or Mother Nature has reclaimed the land over centuries, there are usually plenty of ruins and abandoned buildings to loot through and outfit your character with all the tools needed to survive.
Few genres offer quite so much gameplay variety, with stealth, combat, RPG character-building and hardcore survival modes providing something for everyone once the bombs have dropped and you’ve worked up the courage to leave your bunker. And it’s not all guns, gore and mutants either: the end of the world can be peaceful too. Sometimes.