Call Of Duty: Ranking Every Game Mode From Worst To Best

Zombies, which made its first appearance in Treyarch's World At War, was a sleeper hit for the series. Modern Warfare 2 subsequently came along and offered perhaps the best online experience in the franchise, but something was missing after the 69 stars on offer in Special Ops mode had been collected.

Infinity Ward therefore introduced their take on the survival genre in Modern Warfare 3, tasking players with facing increasingly more difficult waves of enemies on the game's assorted multiplayer maps, allowing them to buy weapons, perks and other advantages with the cash they garnered from kills.

Despite offering incredible depth, Survival just didn't click with players as much as its undead-slaying counterpart. Infinity Ward tried again in Ghosts with Extinction, swapping out humans for ancient creatures called cryptids, before Sledgehammer offered Exo Survival in their debut outing, which started out Survival-esque and morphed into Zombies-lite after all three of its tiers had been completed.

Both developers subsequently adopted the mantra of 'if you can't beat them, join them' by incorporating Zombies into their next releases, cementing its status as 'the' survival-focused game type. Whether one of them will grow weary of imitation and attempt a new formula in the future is anyone's guess.