A Horde of The Best PC Horde Modes

Some of history's best-remembered battles, such as Thermopylae and The Alamo, are those in which badly outnumbered soldiers sacrifice themselves in a valiant last stand against an overwhelming force. Even in defeat, the defenders die as heroes. In gaming, these battles have many names -- horde, survival, holdout, last stand, and more -- but they all have one thing in common: it's often not about whether or not you die, but how well you die, usually as measured in the sheer quantity of enemy corpses you eventually fall on top of. Here are the games that stand out to us as the best that PC gaming has to offer.


Bulletstorm's Anarchy Mode: Survive In Style



I know, I'll probably have to fight Nathan to the death over this, but for now let me just explain why Anarchy is a great fast-food burger version of a good horde mode.

For one thing, you don't need a full four-man squad to play this. You literally just need a single friend and you're good to go, meaning the matchmaking problems that can dog other horde modes aren't much less of an issue here. (It's a good thing, too, because Bulletstorm uses Games For Windows Live, so just rounding up one friend is harder than it should be.)

Once you're in a game it's dead simple: murder wave after wave of progressively more difficult enemies with your trusty assault rifle, your energy leash, and whatever other gear you feel like buying. The twist in Bulletstorm is that survival is less important than being the most stylish mass-murderer around. Those waves of mutants are a resource to be mined for skillshots and comic executions, and that's where it gets tricky. You and your buddy might have a dozen guys firing at you from all directions, but you really need to focus on on leash-bouncing your victim high into the air before blasting him to pieces. It's giddy, dumb fun, which is all Bulletstorm ever wants us to have.


FEAR 3's Contractions Mode: Alma's Doom Fog



Forget the dumb and unimaginative campaign -- FEAR 3 has some good multiplayer gameplay, and its horde mode, Contractions, is no exception. If you can gather three friends to play it (and you'll need to, because the multiplayer community is almost nonexistent these days), it's has some great twists on the formula.

You and your team defend a structure set in a slightly larger map. Between waves, you can repair barricades and scavenge the map for new gear -- but once the timer ticks down, a thick fog shrouds the map and waves of enemies pour in.

There's one other thing to keep you on your toes: Alma, everybody's favorite angry ghost girl, wanders the map at random. If you so much as look at her, she'll warp you... somewhere. Usually out into the fog, which is pretty much exactly where you don't wanna be. It's a crazy wildcard, and will inevitably pose that best of team-shooter dilemmas: does the squad leave cover to attempt a rescue and keep the team strong, or accept the loss and save themselves? Also, there's something hilarious about having hardened shooter veterans turning their faces toward the wall to avoid making eye contact with a little girl in a dress.


Men of War: Assault Squad's Skirmsh Mode: Bleed For Every Inch



In its $5 Skirmish Pack DLCs, MOWAS offers stacks of real-time strategy scenarios where your four-man team has a few minutes to prepare for an absolute onslaught of enemy forces. Each forces you to balance the need to hold every inch of ground against preserving your crucial forces. What sounds like it should be a static, defensive battle end up with a tense and rewarding back-and-forth rhythm as you give ground where you have to (and extract the bloodiest price possible for it), then try and steal as much back as you can whenever you get a brief respite.

Skirmish also puts Men of War's scavenging mechanics to great use. As ammo runs low and your best weapons get shot to pieces, you'll start converting enemy gear to your cause, turning their own machine guns and mortars against them.


Dawn of War 2's The Last Stand Mode: Loot For The Loot God



The first time you play Dawn of War 2's three-player Last Stand mode (which is available as a separate $10 game), you don't have a snowball's chance of surviving beyond the first few waves. Level 1 champions just aren't equipped to handle hordes of tyranids, Chaos Marines, orks, and eldar, especially when the heavy weapons roll out. That might strike you as a little unfair, but since when are horde modes supposed to be fair?

This is a loot chase: each game earns you XP, which levels up your champion and earns you more wargear options for armor, weapons, and support slots, many of which come with impressive crowd-control powers or anti-armor firepower. Like in Diablo or Borderlands, it gives a rewarding sense of progress and power -- I enjoy speccing out my heroes and seeing what new role they can play after they get some new gear.

It's never hard to find games with strangers (though you'll have better luck playing with the Steam-powered Retribution or Last Standalone than the GFWL-using vanilla DoW2 or Chaos Rising), and the different combinations of three heroes can create very different dynamics. Partnering up with a Space Marine and an eldar will be about kiting and crowd control, while putting a tyranid Hive Tyrant in the mix will let the team use waves of tyranid minions to hold the enemy onslaught at bay. Knowing how to work together with different hero types utilizing different builds is one of the best parts of Last Stand, because it makes each game a really individual experience.

But really, this mode is an excuse to send giant Warhammer 40K badasses smacking into other badasses, leaving thousands of enemy cannon fodder dead in their wake.


Team Fortress 2's Mann vs Machine Mode: Tower Defense Minus the Towers



What separates Mann vs Machine mode from a tower-defense game is a lack of defense towers (except, of course, for the Engineer's turret). Waves of robotic enemies march along a predetermined path toward a goal, and you and your team must pore over the map and craft a plan: The Heavy will stand here and spray bullets at everyone going by. The Demoman bombs them at this choke point. It's a clever use of TF2's class and inventory systems, and works quite well. It's also fairly demanding, respecting TF2's place as a skill shooter and forcing us to actually hit targets where it counts, instead of just counting on splash damage to do the dirty work.

Of course, it requires a bit more team coordination from the get-go than a lot of other games on this list, and people really need to know what they're doing or things quickly go awry. That might make MvM much more fun once you find a good group to play with (teams are anywhere between 3 and 6 players), but it also makes random matches a little more frustrating.


Space Marine's Exterminatus Mode: Dakka-Dakka-Dakka



If you think about it, most of the Warhammer 40K universe is horde mode on a galactic scale. So it's fitting that Warhammer 40K: Space Marine has a satisfyingly bloody, noisy, difficult horde mode in which you and a team of three other Astartes (Space Marines to the uninitiated) defend a map against waves of enemies like orks and Chaos Space Marines.

What sets Space Marine apart is its combination of ranged and melee combat, and the way the classes work together. It gives Space Marine a different pace, because combat often has two phases: there's the part where you're managing the fight and holding enemies at bay, and then there's the moment when your team finally gets overwhelmed and it's time to smash, cut, and gut-stomp your way to the end of the wave. The different classes of Marine, from the jump-pack equipped Assault Infantry to the Support Gunner to the general-purpose Rifleman all have crucial roles to play in each phase.

Really, though, I just love the full-throated violence of Space Marine, and it's hyper-powerful weapons and giants in hulking suits of armor. This is what being an Astartes warrior is all about.


Killing Floor: Taking The Bait



Killing Floor is one of the finest and most demanding horde-style games out there, and it's a regular visitor to the $5 to $10 bracket during Steam sales (although there's a ton of additional DLC out there for it).

Your six-man squad is mired in something much worse than a zombie apocalypse: it's more like a hellgate opened the same week Cthulu awakened and aliens invaded. You simply have to survive enemy waves in wide variety of different levels, using the best military-grade hardware you can buy.

Ah, but there's the rub: you get everything from a shopkeeper who opens her doors between waves at random locations, keeping your squad torn between wanting to stay put in a good position and a risky dash to a new location to restock on supplies and upgrade hardware. It's especially cruel when you get lost on the way back to the shop, reach it just as the next wave starts and she vanishes, and now you're all stuck in a totally indefensible location with the same crappy gear you had last round. I love it.


Saints Row: The Third's Whored Mode: Complete Absurdity



Does simple gameplay get better if it happens to be about a drunk man in a furry costume blasting a wave of dildo-wielding leather-fetishists with a rocket launcher? I like to think so, and that's why I recommend Saints Row the Third's Whored Mode, which can be played with alone or with a single co-op friend. It's not sophisticated, but it offers a never-ending supply of "WTF did I just see?" delights. Just the other night I shotgunned a bunch of little kids in the face, but it's cool: they were zombies. Then I hopped in a Humvee and murdered a small army of costume-wearing sports team mascots.

I can't pretend it's a particularly smart or demanding survival mode, but it definitely stands out as one of the more entertaining ones, at least in the short term.


Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer: Biotic Playground



Mass Effect 3 isn't a great shooter, but it's not really supposed to be: it's a class-based RPG-shooter. Its multiplayer horde mode, then, is a bit like a four-man MMO raid -- it takes combinations of tanking, crowd control, and DPS to survive the different types of enemies and missions types that trigger with each new wave.

It seems simple at first -- just hunker down and shoot the waves of Cerberus, Reapers, or Geth that try to kill you -- but I've noticed that ME3 has a way of slapping you down just when you start to think "This is too easy" by introducing objectives that force your team out of its comfort zone and around the map. That's when it's time to start watching your back.

Another bonus aspect is that multiplayer gives you a way to play around with the abilities of ME3's classes without replaying the entire single-player campaign. It's a great way to learn how the abilities, ammo types, and special powers can combine and interact in such explosive ways within a squad.


But What About...?

Gears of War 2 through 4? Not on PC, doesn't count.

Left 4 Dead has a Last Stand mode, too, but something interesting happens there: it's kind of boring. It's a timer chase as your team simply tries to survive in a super-confined and tactically uninteresting area. That can be fun for a little while, but really, it pales next to the campaign mode. The reason is that Left 4 Dead already owes too much to horde modes. It's a co-op run-and-gun zombie shooter, and at any moment can turn into a horde mode. Locking players in a room with a stopwatch and saying, "Good luck," just doesn't compete.

Similarly, Payday: The Heist is almost nothing but a horde mode disguising itself as a series of missions. It's you and three friends trying to throw back increasingly savage assaults from the police, always running low on ammunition and health. It's tactical and demanding, and the very best that a horde mode can be. The reason it doesn't qualify for this list is its lack of an actual horde mode.

I'd love to include Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor's Operation Stonewall mode, which gives me a tiny taste of the glory of the legendary Carentan mission from the original campaign where a team of Americans holds wave upon wave of Germans at bay as they assault a town. But it's just a single map and the factions are locked, so there's just not much to it. I hope that for more in Company of Heroes 2!

Another also-ran is Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, which has a horde mode that would be much more fun if its maps gave us room to actually use the Cybertronians' definitive ability: transforming into fast-moving vehicles.