10 Video Game Cliches That Need To Die

9. The Same Four Zombie Enemy Types

At one point this entry was simply going to be about zombies in general, but really it isn't the creatures themselves that are boring and outdated (otherwise they wouldn't have persevered in media for decades), but how developers use them in video games.

Take Days Gone for instance; this was a zombie apocalypse game that the devs were constantly trying to push as being unique and separate from the thousands which came before. Here, the undead were known as 'Freakers', and there was enough to distinguish them from regular old shamblers, including a fascinating origin, a genuinely inspired ecology, and the fact that they were constantly mutating into new forms.

What made all that set dressing useless was the fact that the behaviour of the enemies conformed to the same old zombie types we've fought against before. There was the regular brainless fodder, the tank strong zombie and the fast, agile one that jumped around. All that was missing was the bloated one that would spit and blow up.

At this point, after these templates have been the basis for sub-bosses even outside of zombie fiction, it's overdone, and they have no right showing up in a zombie game ever again.