Most Popular Video Games in New Zealand
Each country has its own unique gaming scene. Take Korea, for example, with their beloved PC bangs (gaming cafes) and obsession with MMORPGs.
Jump to China, and you’ll see a bigger mobile gaming market where gamers strive to play all the best free games. Finally, zip over to America, and you’ll find streaming and esports culture that can’t be topped.
New Zealand has also been cultivating its own passion for gaming, with its many indie game developers vying to create the next best thing, but what exactly are the nation’s gamers drawn to? Alongside their own thriving indie scene, New Zealanders enjoy blockbuster titles just like gamers of any country in the world. What’s trending right now? Let’s take a look.
Fallout Series
If we were to account for all the Fallout games currently dominating the New Zealand charts, they’d occupy three or four spots. Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Fallout: New Vegas have all been ever-so-popular among Kiwis lately, thanks to the release of the new Fallout TV series based on the video game franchise.
With its post-apocalyptic world-building, the freedom in the gameplay, and the heavy consequences of your choices and actions, people have fallen in love with this incredible action role-playing series that spans over two decades.
Fallout: New Vegas, the earliest instalment of the three games mentioned, was released in 2010 and has gamers playing as the Courier, who must transport a package across the Mojave Desert. Meanwhile, Fallout 4, released five years later, revolves around a primary story taking place in the year 2287.
Players play as the Sole Survivor, who emerges from a cryogenic state in an underground fallout shelter. Their main mission is to search for their missing son in an open-world environment. Finally, Fallout 76, released in 2018, centres around a mysterious plague in a place called Appalachia.
Fallout was never forgotten, but it certainly is experiencing a revival.
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 picks up where Helldivers left off as a direct sequel. Since it’s a third-person shooter, it diverges from the previous “top-down shooter” style that the first Helldivers employed. Rather than adopt military cliché like many other shooters do, the franchise is inspired by military science fiction.
Helldivers 2 takes place on Super Earth, a place full of alien bugs, chainsaw robots, and other enemies. The Helldiver troops are threatened by the Automatons, an army of robots ready to take out humanity, and there’s also the threat of the wild Terminids – a type of insectoid that, at the same time, produce a valuable resource called E-710.
The premise of the game is one-of-a-kind, and paired with the use of friendly fire, realistic armour physics, blood spray and dismemberment, and a wide variety of weapons like flamethrowers and machine guns, it presents an intense and fast-paced package.
The best part about Helldivers 2, though, is its online multiplayer mode, featuring long-term campaigns and varied missions that never play out the same way.
Grand Theft Auto V
With all the hype surrounding the release of GTA VI, it’s no wonder that people have resorted to booting up GTA V again and replaying the exciting, outrageous, and downright weird and wacky storylines as Trevor, Michael, and Franklin.
Although many other Grand Theft Auto games preceded number five, GTA V is widely regarded as the best, having received a laundry list of nominations and awards for its achievements.
Grand Theft Auto V is zany, funny, engaging, and will keep you hooked for days on end. Players can navigate the countryside of San Andreas and the city of Los Santos, switching between three vastly different characters with different lifestyles.
With the open-world gameplay, players can practically do whatever they please, whether it’s going to the strip club or getting a fresh fade. But it’s the heists and missions that truly raise the stakes and elevate the experience.
Red Dead Redemption 2
The creators of GTA V, Rockstar Games, are also responsible for another popular title on this list: Red Dead Redemption 2. This action-adventure game is the third volume of the Red Dead series, a Western-themed franchise that features on-brand elements like robberies, horseback riding, shootouts, and more.
Set in an offbeat representation of America in 1899, players play as an outlaw and member of a gang, Arthur Morgan. All sorts of happenings go on in the Wild West, with rival gangs and other foes to deal with while navigating the open world.
Instead of the typical weapons you’d find with a shooter, the Western theme means players get to handle revolvers, bows, lassos, Gatling guns, and interesting melee weapons such as tomahawks.
There’s also a crime system, where players can commit and evade crimes, horses and stagecoaches as transport, bounty hunting, poker, public executions, and an incredible variety of landscapes to accompany your adventure.
Interestingly, Red Dead Redemption 2 was one of the most expensive video games to make in history. But considering its mind-blowing scope, this should perhaps come as no surprise.
EA Sports FC 24
After 30 years of being FIFA, EA rebranded their renowned FIFA games to EA Sports FC, no thanks to a licensing issue. Once you get over the big surface-level rebrand, however, you’ll see that the new FC game has a look, feel, and gameplay that outshines all previous FIFA games.
All the brilliance of this football simulation game still exists – but they’ve added next-level features that effectively change the game.
Players can play as women footballers in Ultimate Team, the Evolutions feature allows for stat boosts, AcceleRATE 2.0 brought in seven movement archetypes for figures rather than the previous three, and PlayStyles was introduced. With PlayStyles, in-game footballers could reflect a truer representation of their real-life play styles with 34 to choose from.
