An update coming this month is making World War Z Aftermath zombie hordes even bigger than they already were. For sheer number of zombies on screen at a time, World War Z already has few competitors – only Days Gone leaps to mind as a possible competitor in undead crowd population. Nevertheless, Saber Interactive has announced that Horde Mode XL is coming to the co-op game January 24, and it’ll swell the swarms’ sizes to heretofore unseen sizes.
Horde Mode first arrived back in 2019, before the arrival of the Aftermath update. In it, teams of survivors face off against increasingly challenging waves of enemies in standard horde mode fashion. World War Z, the game, has made the film’s centrepiece zombie swarms one of its core gameplay pillars, and the undead climb over each other to scale walls and other structures to attack players and barricades.
There’s something immensely satisfying about lobbing grenades into these tightly packed zombie pile-ons, and so the Horde Mode XL’s promise to put “more zombies on screen than ever before” is indeed an enticing one. Any explosive will send zombie bodies cartwheeling in every direction, following a muffled thwump sound of the ordnance cooking off underneath tonnes of scrambling zombie flesh.
Couple that with the new melee system and first-person perspective added with Aftermath, and it sounds like Horde Mode XL is going to be a good old time. Of course, any of the best zombie games on PC will also give you the chance to blast the undead back to where they came from, so have a look through our list if you’re looking for alternatives.