Evil Never Dies
HIGH Wiping out a giant zombie with a shotgun in one hand and revolver in the other.
LOW Having suiciders spawn right on top of me over and over again.
WTF That buckethead zombie is getting up to some weird stuff.
The Zombie Army franchise has been chugging along for over a decade now, giving players a chance to blast apart hordes of the undead using weapons and mechanics from the the Sniper Elite games. Four titles in, ZA has developed its own cast and lore, and with Hitler finally destroyed at the end of Dead War, the developers at Rebellion are looking to expand the world beyond the Nazi demonology that had driven the plot until now.
This time around the threat is of a more eldritch nature. In a plot largely cribbed from the film The Keep, an allied bombing raid has released an incredibly powerful horror from its prison beneath a German castle, and it’s up to the player to end its reign of terror before the whole world is consumed. Despite the new premise and justification for the action, the game is built entirely out of assets from Zombie Army 4, ensuring that there will be plenty of familiar Nazi zombies to blast.
Unfortunately, the transition to VR has proven a little bumpy for the franchise. Rather than simply adding a VR perspective and manual weapon handling — a formula that has worked fantastically for Capcom in recent years — the decision was made to offer an original and significantly scaled-down experience.
Most of the series’ classic weapons appear, including the delightful triple-barreled shotgun, which is an absolute beast to use. This is a good thing.
The enemies, on the other hand, suffer from an extremely reduced roster. There are regular zombies, tank zombies, machine gun zombies, snipers, grenadiers, and dynamite-clad suiciders — but that’s it for standard enemies. No sneaky creepers, monstrous butchers, or vomiting water zombies. The iconic zombie shark — tragically — appears only as a taxidermied specimen on a wall.
From a mechanical standpoint, the gameplay is almost perfect. Weapons are intuitive, and movement options are varied enough to make sure everyone from newbies to the most experienced VR players are satisfied. Ironically it’s the sniping that keeps it from being fully functional.
Miming a two-handed weapon is never completely effective, which led me to having a shakier aim when looking down the scope than I would have liked. Other VR sniping titles have offered motion smoothing to make the aiming feel right — and considering that Zombie Army includes the main franchise’s ‘hold breath to slow time’ mechanic, and while the game claims to offer this feature, I could detect no difference in aim shakiness whether it was turned on or off.. It feels somehow wrong that I found myself relying mainly on handguns to deal with most of the threats in a Sniper Elite spinoff.
However, the biggest issue here has is the inability to offer the overwhelming threat that the franchise is known for.
Zombie Army has historically been about desperate battles against hordes of zombies, with the player leaning on the raw power of their sniper rifle to level half a dozen bunched-up corpses with a single bullet. ZAVR, by comparison, has a hard limit of six zombies in the world at a time. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but that’s only because it absolutely isn’t. Given the arsenal the player is armed with — at any point they’ll have a pistol, machinegun and sniper rifle, as well as up to three grenades or landmines — six zombies just aren’t very threatening.
The developers try to compensate for this limitation by forcing the player to spend most of their time in tight quarters. While it’s a workable solution and leads to plenty of intense, close-up skirmishes, the result is that the sniper rifle — the weapon that the entire franchise is built around — feels largely irrelevant to most of the action.
For me, the sniper rifle only came out when my other weapons ran dry, and even then I mostly fired it from the hip. There are only a handful of areas in the campaign that allow the player to fire from a good distance away, allowing players to enjoy the classic tactics of setting up mines to defend approaches and thinning the ranks as the horde draws close. Of course, there are no hordes in ZAVR, so these sniper sequences let me wipe out every zombie before they ever had a chance of getting near.
While the combat may not feel like franchise material fans expect, the developers have done a great job of building battlefields that justify the frantic fighting. There are cluttered graveyards where zombies can pop up at any moment, mazelike crypts with threats around every turn, and the standout — a mad science bunker full of strange machinery and piping that the zombies can use to corner the player.
These environments look great and are packed with collectibles and interesting details. The franchise has always done a great job of depicting a European theatre absolutely wrecked by the zombie apocalypse, and ZAVR doesn’t disappoint from an art design standpoint. The only drawback is that the graphics have clearly been dialed back to ensure that the game will work on all headsets, meaning that I never really felt as if I was getting the full experience out of my PSVR2.
Zombie Army VR isn’t a failure by any means — the zombie shooting is certainly thrilling in its brutality, even if it still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. The relative paucity of zombies, the fact that the sniper rifle feels like a secondary weapon, and the lack of any of the franchise’s crazier elements, like magical combat abilities or zombified vehicles, conspire to make it feel like half of the experience it should be. Maybe we’ll get extremely lucky and when Rebellion gets around to making Zombie Army 5 they’ll consider developing a VR version alongside it so that we’ll finally get a chance to truly inhabit this world.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Rebellion and Xtended Realities and published by Rebellion. It is currently available on PC/Quest 3/PSVR2. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PSVR2. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. Multiplayer modes were not sampled.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, and Language. The swearing isn’t too bad, although the violence absolutely is. Not to mention the presence of a bunch of Nazi iconography and the fact that the player has to work with ‘heroic’ Nazis to battle the villain. Keep children far away from it.
Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: While the dialogue is subtitled, there are no visual cues present to assist with offscreen threats. This is especially troubling because suiciders can one-shot the player if they get too close, and the only warning players get about their approach are their famous screams. Consider playing the game on easy difficulty only.
Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. There is no control diagram. Players use one thumbstick to control movement and the other to change facing — they can decide which controller does which in the settings.
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