Summary
As good as a campaign can be, they almost always have a definitive ending. If you want something more after finishing the story, you have to see what developers have added as bonus content.Series like Resident Evil have a survival modewhere you can test your skills and survive as long as possible to rack up points.
It’s a great way to bring back an arcade-like sensibility to a title and let you appreciate the core gameplay. EvenThe Last of Us Part 2added a Roguelike survival mode in its remaster. It makes us wonder why the games below didn’t include a survival mode of some sort.
Alan Wake 2’s story takes you on one of the wildest narrative rides in recent gaming memory. The shooting was not the main point of praise, but it holds up decently enough. Several setpieces task you with surviving an onslaught of enemies. Why doesn’t the game make this a separate mode to let you shoot up enemies without the story context?
Exploration is a large part of Alan Wake 2 and you can go a long time without combat, so a survival mode would let people more directly jump into the action when they feel the urge.
We bring up Max Payne 2, so we should also mention that Max Payne 3 also had a Dead Man Walking survival mode in its multiplayer. Unfortunately, you have to play this one online and the multiplayer is not as active as it once was.
With Ultrahand and the ability to combine resources on the fly, combat makes a major improvement inThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomover its predecessor. However, there is currently no mode where you can just go at it against as many enemies as possible.
You could play Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, but it’s not quite the same. It would be interesting to spend your time prepping for a large battle and then seeing how far you could get against all the game can throw at you.
6Stranglehold
It Would Add Replay Value To A Short Campaign
This early PS3 and Xbox 360 game helped fill the third-person shooter void for fans of Max Payne when that series took a long break before its third entry. The only issue is the campaign consists of only six levels. There is a multiplayer mode, but it is no longer active.
It would have been great to be able to indulge in the game’s extreme violence andshockingly detailed environmental destructionin a survival mode. It could be similar to the Dead Man Walking mode from Max Payne 2 where enemies just keep spawning on different parts of the map and your score is simply how long you survive.
There was a sequel in development, but it was canceled as a result of Midway’s financial woes.
One of the last missions inMetal Gear Solid 5sees Snake defending himself against an all-out attack from the Russian army. It’s one of the hardest and most engaging missions as you use up so much ammunition destroying the vehicles and enemy soldiers that come your way.
It shows how well the gameplay can be in an action environment when so much of the game is based on stealth. You can always replay the mission, but it’s too bad that you can’t engage in a survival mode where the waves get increasingly more difficult and the action gets more frantic.
The next game in the series is called Metal Gear Survive, but it is a zombie survival game made without Hideo Kojima’s involvement. It is far from what most Metal Gear fans want from the series.
TheDead Spaceremake did what all the best remakes do and made us feel like we did the first time we played Dead Space in 2008. It looks as good and plays as well as we remember the first game, but in reality, it makes many small improvements that add up to something grand.
The creative way you are forced to dispose of the Necromorphs would make a survival mode a lot of fun. You would have to make quick decisions on the fly about whether or not you should use your ammunition or if you should try and use the environment to kill the monsters.
Remedy’s Controlis fantastic for its creative combat scenarios that make good use of the game’s interactive environments. Your powers often throw pieces of furniture and equipment about the environment as you take down enemies. It’s so detailed that the game’s performance often tanked on PS4.
With its PS5 upgrade, a survival mode feels like it could have been a possibility since it holds a solid 60 frames per second in the story mode. You can move and float around the environment, so a survival mode would become fun in later waves as you desperately zoom around the map looking for objects to throw at enemies.
RoboCop: Rogue City was thehidden gem of the FPS genre in 2023. It looked cool from trailers, but no one expected it to play as well as did or feel as much like a genuine RoboCop story. The enemy variety, physics, and extreme violence would make a survival mode engaging both from a gameplay and visual perspective.
We could also imagine new power ups and upgrades added just for this mode, like maybe the ability to temporarily move faster. The game already has a hectic, arcade-y feel in its combat, which lends itself well to a mode based on surviving and getting a high score.
1Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus
If Doom Eternal Has One, Why Not Wolfenstein?
Wolfenstein: The New Order andits sequel, The New Colossusperfectly ride the line between old-school FPS sensibilities and a modern focus on story and characters.
There is a tragic story about outcasts fighting against one of the world’s greatest evils mixed with exciting combat encounters where you dual-wield automatic weapons and cathartically rip Nazis to shreds with your bullets. The latter is a great argument for a survival mode. After all, Doom Eternal got a survival mode and that’s another series from the early ’90s that received a popular revival.
Looking for a new and exciting survival game to try?Nightingale is available on Steamin Early Access starting July 19, 2025!
Survival Week
Welcome to the home of TheGamer’s Survival Week, a celebration of all things, well, survival. Here you’ll find features, interviews, and more dedicated to this popular genre, brought to you by Inflexion Games' upcoming open-world survival crafter, Nightingale.
