Best Survival Games Set In Cities

When the words "survival game" come up within the gaming industry, most gamers picture a wilderness, desolate and cut off from modern society. This is a fair picture, as many survival games put the player in a completely isolated setting, whether that be a remote island or on an alien planet with no other humans to be found. But despite this being the norm, it isn’t always the case.

Players who love the survival genre will have experienced a number of different settings. A survival game set in a city seems counter-intuitive, but there are many ways to make surviving day-to-day in a more modern setting just as challenging and unfriendly as a frozen wilderness or the depths of the Amazon.

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8 Miscreated

Brutal Hardcore Multiplayer Survival

There might be survival games more polished and less grind-filled than Miscreated, but many survival gamers love the punishment of a hard grind to gather resources and level up. Miscreated gives all that with the added bonus of being multiplayer. A couple of friends together will have a good chance of building up a little quicker, and maybe even surviving this brutal post-apocalyptic adventure which has been compared to Rust.

Though Miscreated features large, desolate cities broken after a final huge war among humanity, players have a larger open world they can explore around the cities themselves. It features deep caves, large forests and a wide diversity of vehicles which players can drive to explore every inch of this wondrous, dead world.

7 DayZ

A Vastly Improved Survival Experience

Though it remains imperfect, DayZ has improved a lot since a messy initial release. What began as a mod for Arma 2 has become an open-world multiplayer-only survival game that allows players the fear of trying to survive against hordes of zombies in a destroyed version of Chernarus (a fictional country based on the Czech Republic).

Though the game takes place across much of the countryside as well as the urban areas of Chernarus, it provides all the fear factor for players of trying to stay alive in a city populated by undead monstrosities. Few zombie games have achieved such a thing, and even fewer have been bold enough to make the experience a full survival game while doing so. This makes DayZ a unique and terrifying entry in the genre.

6 Urban Survival

Randomly Generated Nomad Survival

• Platforms: Windows
• Developers: Helix Games
• Released: September 25, 2020

There aren’t many survival games set in cities, but there are even fewer set in a fairly normal city where human life is ongoing. The indie-developed Urban Survival is therefore unique for putting players in a randomly generated city and tasking them with not finding a home, but becoming the ruler of the homeless on the city streets.

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By  Lucas Simons

In this ridiculous, yet fun, survival game, the open world of this city is filled with trash that should be explored for valuables. There are homeless people that the player can enlist as warriors in their growing homeless empire, and enemies who will try to stop the player’s progress. It's part strategy, part management, and all survival in style.

5 Dying Light

Dynamic Zombie City Horror

The best zombie games are dynamic in nature, making sure the player never truly feels safe and therefore heightening the sense of horror felt throughout playing. Dying Light is set in a fictional Middle East city called Harran, where a secret agent is dropped in to recover a sensitive file before the zombie outbreak in the city becomes total.

Being able to parkour around the city, follow the excellent story, and deal with zombies both when they’re slow and easy to fight (during the day) and brutally terrifying and fast (during the night) makes for one of the best zombie games ever. As a survival game, it holds up nearly ten years later with some of the very best of the genre. The open-world city of Harran is amazingly fun to explore and survive in.

4 Project Zomboid

Knox County’s Temporary Survival Classic

Though there are a lot of zombie survival games, few of them have taken on the classic Call of Duty Nazi Zombies idea that it isn’t about whether one survives, but rather how long one can last. The beautiful sights of Knox County are the setting of Project Zomboid, which, with its latest stable release in 2021, now includes the city of Louisville, helping make this zombie horde game even more intricate and full of life.

While the player will spawn in one of four different towns around Louisville, the city itself now plays a much larger role in the game. The urban setting, isometric view, and open world of Knox County give Project Zomboid a unique vibe, which helps to set it apart in an overstuffed genre. With a huge modding community and endless ways to try and survive even longer, this is a hugely replayable game even for the survival genre.

3 Surviving Mars

City-Building On The Red Planet

Some of the best survival games set in cities are not just about having a single player-controlled character survive, but the entire city itself. City-building games have blended flawlessly with the survival genre, and Surviving Mars is one of the best examples. The premise is in the title: players choose a sponsoring nation from Earth and begin to build a colony on the Red Planet, dealing with all sorts of threats created from real Martian data along the way.

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By  Peter Morics

Surviving Mars features a huge number of challenges, including having to import most materials from Earth and attempting to stave off a brutal environment. Players can move up the technology tree and bring in more colonists, each of whom will come with advantages and disadvantages. Players must manage these aspects to create a fully functioning colony that could be wiped out at any time by natural disasters or other “mysteries,” which are randomly introduced as the game goes on.

2 This War Of Mine

A Very Different Type Of War Game

Instead of focusing on the frontlines of battle, This War Of Mine uses the context of war to focus on a group of survivors living in a besieged city, attempting to last through the battle with little resources. The player controls the entire group and has to manage, strategize and survive in the fictional city of Pogoren, making for an unconventional setting for a survival game.

Instead of the traditional survival game formula of going out in the day and staying in by night, players must hide indoors during the day due to enemy sniper presence. This means players must go out scavenging for resources at night to try and survive, and then craft, cook and heal from their exertions when the sun is up. Interactions with NPCs and combatants, and the general nature of trying to survive in the worst of circumstances, make This War Of Mine a haunting title, but an intriguing one which uses the city environment in a unique way.

1 Frostpunk

The Ultimate City Survival Experience

Another city-building game, Frostpunk, blends many of the traditional ideas of a survival game, particularly the hostile environment of a freezing volcanic winter which takes place in an alternate history, during the 19th century. The ultimate blending of management, survival, and strategy, Frostpunk opened up the wider city-building genre by showing the wider gaming and survival community the sort of excitement and strategic thinking required to survive in such a brutal situation.

Frostpunk forces players to make hard choices, not always knowing which route is the right one to lead the people and the city to survive. There are many different scenarios to explore across different “generator” sites, and all kinds of unexpected situations. These make Frostpunk one of the most challenging survival games on the market today, perfect to check out for survival and strategy game veterans.

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