17 Horror games like Iron Meat that you should try

Shadowgrounds breathes fresh air into the action genre with explosive combat sequences, an innovative weapon upgrade system, and an intriguing storyline.

A co-op horde shooter whose swarm tech is the draw: hundreds of zombies climb over each other into structures, and the class system rewards coordinating rather than scattering. Levels are short and replayable. The shooting itself is functional but unremarkable, and the campaign chapters are thin connective tissue between the set-piece swarm moments.

Wave-based co-op against slow, heavy specimens, built around a between-round shop and perks that level by playstyle rather than by menu. Weapon feedback is meaty. It shows its origins as a mod — level design is functional rather than crafted, and later waves come down to holding one corridor while a friend welds the door behind you.

The AI Director is the whole design: it places hordes and items based on how well you are doing, so no two runs of a campaign play the same and tension stays authored without being scripted. Four campaigns only, which is thin, and the sequel superseded it so completely that finding populated servers now takes patience.

DOOM 3 is a first-person shooter, the third installment in the series, serving as a reboot to the previous games. ###Plot As the game is set in a science fiction universe, the events span accordingly.

Everything the first game did plus melee weapons, daylight campaigns and special infected that force the team apart rather than just damage it. The AI Director still shapes every run. It absorbed the original so completely that the community split never healed, and the campaigns lean on finale set pieces that become rote once you know the safe corners.

id's follow-up to Doom, and the first with true 3D movement — rocket jumps, full vertical aim, and a Lovecraftian gloom scored by Nine Inch Nails. The movement still feels quicker than most modern shooters. Long-time players tend to prefer a source port to the official re-release, which quietly altered difficulty tuning and is treated as a compromised preservation job.

Three separate campaigns — Marine, Alien and Predator — each rebuilding the game around a different body: the Marine's motion tracker and dread, the Alien's wall-crawling, the Predator's cloak and vision modes. The Marine campaign is the one that holds up. The other two are short and thin by comparison, and the multiplayer that carried it in 2010 is long dead.

A free online pool game covering 8-ball, 9-ball, snooker and several variants against bots or real opponents, with the plain, functional presentation of an early-2000s lobby game. The physics are better than the interface suggests. The catch is the business model: the free access runs out and continuing requires a recurring subscription rather than a one-off purchase, which is the single most common complaint.

Dive into the zombie apocalypse with Zombie Panic! Source: a cooperative, survival-horror first-person-shooter. One of the most popular Half-Life 2 modifications of all time. Choose your team as the undead or a survivor. Enjoy their unique abilities, weapons, and challenges in this high-paced, action-packed thriller.

Wider environments and better lighting than the original, with the slow-motion shooting mostly intact and a mech section that breaks up the pacing. The AI is noticeably less sharp than in the first game, though, and the horror leans on jump scares rather than the dread the original built. Competent, rarely surprising.

Painkiller Overdose is a first-person shooter, the first stand-alone expansion for 2004 People Can Fly game Painkiller.

Its enemy AI is still the reference point twenty years on: soldiers flank, suppress and call out movements, so firefights unfold differently each time. Slow-motion makes that legible instead of trivial. The horror sections have not aged as well — the same office corridors repeat for hours, and the scares telegraph themselves long before they land.