6 Best Games About Killing Waves Of Enemies At Once

One of the most visceral appeals of action games is its ability to line up targets for the player to violently knock down. It’s a cathartic urge that modernity has, thankfully, pushed down or assuaged in most people. However, as the chaos-loving monkeys inside all civilized human beings still get a kick out of whacking virtual adversaries, it makes sense that some games make it their whole deal, and in excess.

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Where sticking a sword in an enemy has been around for about as long as humanoids could be depicted in games, a few developers have seen the wisdom in extracting that primal nightmare of being confronted with a horde of angry bad guys and flipping that power imbalance on its head. With guns, grenades, or glaives, these games guarantee a glut of gore with their gameplay.

Dead Rising

72 Hours Of Mall Mauling

Action-Adventure

Survival Horror

Malls are a love-them-or-hate-them type of place. To some, they are life-affirming temples of consumption. To others, malls are a soul-sucking trap for capitalist zombies. Dead Rising‘s mall is emphatically in the latter category, with the literal walking dead swarming the whole place from top to bottom.

However, Dead Rising‘s superstar reporter, Frank West, is able to take advantage of the mall as no one has ever done before. Each store becomes a cache of weapons for slowing down, chopping through, or smashing up unending waves of the undead. With the glut of consumer items on offer (around 250), Frank is able to get highly creative with his approach.

DOOM Eternal

Flushing Out Hell With Gallons Of Freshly-Squeezed Demon Blood

Released: March 20, 2020
OpenCritic Rating: Mighty

“Rip and tear through hell” isn’t just an activity in DOOM Eternal. It’s a way of life. The Doom Slayer takes this approach to everything: combat, handling computer terminals, and even dealing with friendlies. Powered by a shredding metal soundtrack, every encounter was designed to push the player into that most primal of states.

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DOOM Eternal perfectly rides the line between putting pressure on the player and making them feel like enough of a badass to continue riding the rage. Even healing lost health requires a violent outburst, as HP must be torn from the throats of enemy demons. For those purely interested in cutting through devel guts, its horde mode should satiate that bloodlust.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Cleansing Hordes Of Heretics, One Dreg At A Time

Systems

Released: November 30, 2022
Developer(s): Fatshark
OpenCritic Rating: Fair

The Warhammer 40,000 universe is renowned for its depiction of unrelenting, brutal super-warfare, and Darktide does the kind of justice to those visions of apocalyptic carnage that any self-respecting space marine would carry out against those who turn their back on the God-Emporer of Mankind.

Darktide is best played in a squad of friends, who will be put into the shoes of lowly human (or mutant) ex-cons working their way through the sub-levels of a hive city crawling with chaos-corrupted heretics and abominations. As mostly standard humans of regular strength and stature, Darktide’s enemy waves will always put pressure on those groups who come unprepared.

Grim Dawn

Bursting Through A Billion Bloodbags Of The Damned

Grim Dawn

Systems

Released: February 25, 2016
Developer(s): Crate Entertainment
OpenCritic Rating: Strong

Three things are guaranteed in Grim Dawn: damnation, more bad guys than good guys, and an overflowing inventory of loot (at least without loot filters). Eldrich-possessed zombies, demonic hounds and insects, and abominations beyond the void are thrown at the player wave after wave through labyrinthian wildernesses, complex tunnel systems, and improbably long basement complexes.

Horror Games Set in the Victorian Era The Order: 1886, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Nightmare Creatures

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This wild-west-Victorian-era hack-and-slash ARPG gives players plenty of ways to deal with the endless undead torrents with nine masteries, or classes, that can be combined together. Those who might be torn between using storm magic or greatswords to blow apart their enemies can do both.

Dynasty Warriors 8

Culling Armies Like Bleeding Fields Of Grass

When many gamers think about massive fights against epic numbers of enemies, the Dynasty Warriors series is sure to spring to mind. While it might not be the first game about juggling an entire enemy army single-handedly, it popularized the format. As usual for the series, Dynasty Warriors 8 puts players behind the eyes of Chinese feudal lords as they work their way through historical battles.

Although the story loosely follows history, the legendary fighters basically win the day single-handedly. Counterfactual missions exploring alternate history are available once the soldier-reaping of the main storyline is complete. Dynasty Warriors also inspired another fighter versus army series, Hyrule Warriors, set in the Legend of Zelda universe.

Vampire Survivors

Fending Off Every Single Creature Of The Night

Released: December 17, 2021
Developer(s): Luca Galante
OpenCritic Rating: Mighty

At first glance, this classic-pixel art style game might not look like a near-bottomless source of enemy-shredding entertainment, but thanks to its crafty reward system, satisfying visual effects, and the clever way it exploits gamers’ love for number progression and efficiency, a player can spend hours hypnotized by Vampire Survivor watching their character slowly chip away at the infinite hordes of darkness.

There are basically two inputs for Vampire Survivor: move and accept rewards. All the monster-mashing action is done passively by the character onscreen, and the player decides which power-ups they use and in which direction they will mow the tide of the undead. Without realizing it, players can lose hours of time watching hundreds of enemies get obliterated by shiny passive attacks each second.