The most common way this comes up is in “survival” games. You browse the environment for health and ammo, and then burn it all up facing massive hordes of zombies (or, ARC, or whatever monster of the day is). I’ve also seen it in other types of games, like in the newer Zeldas where you get dozens of types of weapons, none of which can be repaired.
Something I love about these patterns is that they get you to adapt and shift your playstyle naturally. You aren’t granted transforming ammo that fits whatever weapon you hold - you must use what’s available, even if every option from grenades to flamethrowers ends up being fun.
They provide the fun of looting, as well as a method to expend that loot in a way that maintains the cycle. Nothing irritates me more than the red “inventory full” message, so I make an effort to expend my resources quickly, and a lot of these games reward the player in turn for it.
So, this tends to fit a lot of major/mainstream singleplayer story-based games like Resident Evil, as well as traditional shooters like Half-Life in which all your weapons maintain an ammo count. I’m curious what other unexpected games come up that satisfy this itch, even providing creative ways to encourage “dumping resources” in a rapid way, just to give you empty slots to fill up again.
For persistent multiplayer military simulation with production, logistics and frontline, really checkout Foxhole.
I like steep learning curves and don’t care too much about graphics, if those don’t scare you, try Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (I’ve heard Project Zomboid is similar, but less complex/deep lore).
Project Zomboid.
Zombie survival game that has a really good loop of kill zombies, find loot, transport and sort loot, train skills/fix equipment/improve your base, and then find a new place to loot. It’s honestly more like a Sims game than a typical zombie game. You need to find ways to stay busy and entertained because you can get bored and depressed. Electricity and water will be turned off sometime in the first month (it’s randomized) so you need to find and learn how to use a generator to run a fridge/freezer otherwise food spoils in a couple of days. Water can come from a pond or river but it needs to be boiled if you don’t want to die from a hurt tummy, or if your carpentry skill is high enough you can make rain catchers. The game typically gets massive updates every 1-3 years and the latest one added livestock and blacksmithing.
It can be a hard game to get into and learn because there is so much to it, but it’s really satisfying once things start making sense. And it sounds like something you are looking for
Noita has some of this nature. Your “weapon” for the game is whatever you can find and cobble together, some expendable resources and some just permanent abilities or upgrades. You might do one run with a wand that shoots a limited number of nice powerful balanced spells, or you might find a way to abuse the system and get an unlimited firehose weapon of such unimaginable power that it throws you around the screen like Sonic the Hedgehog whenever you hold down the trigger, or you might assemble a shockingly powerful explosive weapon that will probably wind up ending your run when you get careless and it kills you. No two runs are the same and you’re constantly having to figure out how to make the best of what you’ve got. It is a difficult game, though. The ceiling for how powerful you can make your own abilities is very high, because you can put together some abusive combinations, but in the later levels the enemies are insanely unfairly powerful to compensate.
It’s a blast. In my opinion.
I’ll recommend Escape From Duckov, a parody of sweaty extraction shooters like Tarkov. It avoids the worst parts of that genre by virtue of one thing: it’s entirely single-player. There’s no camping, no trolling, no meta to follow, just you going out on expeditions to explore the world, bring back as much loot as you can carry, upgrade your character and equipment, expand your base, and unlock new areas. The only two friction points are your limited carrying capacity (you’ll be limited by your slots at first, then weight once you have a decent backpack) and that dying twice in a row costs you everything you had equipped - the latter not really being a problem because the game keeps a backup of your last ten saves and lets you jump back in time directly from the load menu, so if losing all the equipment you spent several hours upgrading is a deal-breaker you can simply elect to undo it when it happens.
The looting is the real standout here. Nearly every item you find is used for at least one quest or upgrade, and you continually unlock new places to spend them as you progress. All that food you’ve been hoarding comes in handy after you unlock a gym that uses them to permanently increase your base stats, for example. You’ll also sometimes be forced to make hard choices - say you found an expansion crate that’s used for upgrading the warehouse capacity back at base; unfortunately these crates are obscenely heavy, so if you want to haul it back you’ll need to drop most of what you’re carrying or be limited to slowly dodge-rolling your way to the nearest extraction point.
It’s such an addicting experience, and I’m saying that as someone who normally loathes loot-driven games. If anyone ends up playing, I can’t recommend these three mods enough. The first shows how many of an item you already have in its mouseover popup, which saves you an endless amount of warehouse wrangling due to running out of space, The second shows how much an item would sell for, making prioritizing loot much less stressful when you’re low on inventory slots. The third is a simple luxury mod that adds colored backgrounds to items based on loot rarity.
also it’s adorable, i do not like shooters or the entire premise of the game but the cute rubber ducks were enough to tempt me
This immediately makes me think of Empyrion: Galactic Survival. Where you start crashed on a planet and need to get resources to survive and ultimately build spaceships. There’s enemy structures to attack and loot, and you use your ships/hovercrafts to help deal with the defenses and carry your loot
A lot of it is janky as hell, and I’m not sure I exactly recommend it. But just the same, I had a good time with it. It’s a game about building spaceships, and there’s still a community sharing blueprints that can be downloaded and built so you don’t have to design it yourself if you don’t want to
The riftbreaker
I might be pushing the definition of ‘spending’ a bit, but I’d say Kirby Air Ride(rs)’ City Trial fits this bill. You spend the City phase gathering as many stat boosts as possible, then use your build to compete in a Stadium event. Then you queue up for another match where you get to start over and do it all again.
Sounds like you want to play STALKER Anomaly - GAMMA.
