And when I say "Great zombie game" I mean that open-world zombie survival RPG that I'm sure many of us fantasize about. It seems like every attempt is plagued by sub-par mechanics (DayZ mod) or a campy, light-hearted tone (Dead Rising), or both (Dead Island, State of Decay), or just a general lack of ambition and artistic vision, and in some cases a restrictively small budget (SoD).

The Last of Us came pretty close. It had the powerful, emotive narrative, high production values and solid gameplay I'm looking for, but the RPG elements were limited and the whole game was confined to a large corridoor. edit: when I say "pretty close" I mean tonally, mechanically and it had a big budget and great devs... so foundations for the "great zombie game" were there, it just wasn't the direction ND went for.

The Walking Dead: The Game was simply a good story and nothing else.

Disclaimer before anyone rages: I have played/am playing every game mentioned above and I like all of them, some love, for what they are.

DayZ SA is the next best bet, and it will probably be very good by the time it reaches beta stage, but we'll just have to wait and see on a lot of features like base-building and character progression, and how fleshed-out these features will be, and if the MMO environment really does lend itself to the genre and type of experience they're going for. Oh yeah, and there's the zombies, which we've not seen yet, but are promised to be a radical improvement over the mod zombies, which they need to be.

I haven't played ZombiU or WarZ, one of which looks cool but again isn't really what I'm looking for (or is it?), and the other is literally a scam.

I enjoyed State of Decay and ZombiU. State of Decay is prob the best overall zombi game I've played. ZombiU was the most tense with the danger but the tedious melee hindered the overall game. I haven't played DayZ. Also Left 4 Dead is good, just not for me.

EDIT: Oh and The Last of Us is amazing! I tend to forget it could be considered a zombi game but it is oOne of the best games I've ever played.

How on Earth could Last of Us have come close to an open world survival RPG when it has:

zero open world elements
zero survival elements
weak RPG elements

To me the closest are DayZ for MP and State of Decay for SP and nothing comes close to either of those imho.

I bet Bethesda could make a kick ass open world survival RPG game with zombies. They practically already have if you count the ghouls.

We bought the kids the Mario Wii U bundle for Christmas and also got ZombiU for my oldest boy. So soon I will know more about that one as well. I hear it's great but flawed.

Red Dead Redemption - Undead Nightmare
ZOMBIE BEARS nuff said

/endthread 

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Does Undead Nightmare have any SP content? I need to play this.

I'd say ZombiU came pretty close, it just felt a bit linear but if another was ever made then I think they could do some cool stuff.

Yes the SIngleplayer campaign is around 8 to 10 hours.. It has a standalone disc and really cheap nowadays.. Riding a zombie horse to save a town from zombies is awesome

Totally agree.

This is why I want the DayZ standalone to be great. It has been the closest thing to getting it right so far. In terms of single player games, I still think the first 3 Resident Evil games were incredible.

I meant tonally it was close, and it's the only one out of those mentioned with good core mechanics and high production values. The only one with the basics in place really, then I mentioned that it had limited RPG elements and wasn't open world.

State of Decay has all the ideas but poor execution, so I should say that's the closest... just poor choice of words.

I like Fallout 3/NV, but holy shit is the combat in those games bad, makes what could of been a 200 hour RPG a 50 hour one for me.