THE WALKING DEAD: SAINTS AND SINNERS Review: Fight Against Fate And The Undead

PSVR Review Code Provided by Skydance Interactive

One of the more popular zombie series out there has given us the chance to see what it’s like living in their universe. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is a VR game by Skydance Interactive that puts players in the harsh world of The Walking Dead and face the reality that lies within it. Making tough decisions, fighting against both human and undead, all while managing resources and weapons… this game isn’t as easy as it will seem to be at first. Still, it is one of the most entertaining action VR titles I have had the opportunity to enjoy and I find myself with only a handful of issues.

Story

After attempting to meet up with a newfound friend and finding them on the losing end of an undead battle, you find yourself thrown amidst a warring New Orleans. As people have teamed up into factions, it is clear that zombies aren’t your only enemies here. As bodies pile up between warring factions, whispers spread of a long-lost mystery in the city that could turn the tide of the war. The fate of the city and the survivors of this war depend on your ability to solve the mystery and survive this thriving conflict.

Gameplay

When you start out, you are given a story breakdown, guided through your first visual of the game, and thrown into a tutorial area where you get to first experience the combat. I was thankful for this tutorial because I quickly learned that you have to really drive the melee weapons through if you want them to actually do damage. This did become the more entertaining part of the game for me, but it was nice to learn how to use the guns as well.

After you get the hang of the controls, you start out doing a few missions and are introduced to your home base. Here you have a storage area to keep scavenged items you liked, a recycle bin to scrap the ones you don’t need which gives you resources to build stuff, and the crafting tables where you use your gathered resources to level up different crafting table types and create what it is you need.

Once you have the foundation of the game under your belt, I suggest going back to the main menu and playing through the horde mode called ‘The Trial.’ Here you can practice your combat however you wish, practice your crafting, and get the hang of resource management. The difference is, you won’t have to manage resource material for this as you can craft whatever you’d like, given you have unlocked enough points for it. You get points by doing well through the waves and between each wave you get a little bit of time to craft what you need. It helped a lot as the game gets a bit difficult very suddenly.

As you go through each level, inventory management will quickly become essential as you need to make sure you have any food you might need as well as plenty of weapons to use in case one breaks. There is no crafting out in the open world, but you can find plenty of weapons to use. Any empty slots you have should end up filled before you head back to your home base as you need to be scavaging each level while you complete your mission. Without proper scavaging, you will simply run out of resources to keep up with what you need to survive each venture.

The missions themselves are well guided by the game, but that doesn’t make them any easier to accomplish. Knowing your goal and completing that goal are two completely different things. The game does start you out pretty easy, but once you have your first taste of a difficult mission, it doesn’t slow down from there. While the undead is pretty difficult when in a large number, and pretty much impossible to just run away from might I add, it is the human enemies that I found to be the hardest to deal with. Stealth is a key factor to many missions.

Other missions will have you actually interacting with the NPC humans in the level, but this can lead to a tough moment on your morals. Often times, if you are interacting with the human characters then you are going to be making a moral decision that will alter how the factions end up acting in the end. This tends to lead to the factions fighting each other and you are stuck in the middle of the action knowing that it was your decision that led to this moment.

This game is full of small details as well, which is really nice. If you are low or out of weapons, you can grab a bottle, smash it, and use it as a temporary shiv. Also, when the humans are fighting each other, the fallen characters will eventually get back up as a zombie. This means you have to watch out once you kill someone because they may not be done fighting you just yet!

Visuals

Graphically, the game has a slightly CGI look to it. Rather than giving us a realistic world to experience The Walking Dead’s survival challenge, they have given us a version of it that is a little easier to handle the moral, or perhaps immoral, decisions and actions we take throughout the campaign. It is a good choice for this type of game and allowed the developers to take a few shortcuts that doesn’t take you out of the portrayed reality.

Sounds

It’s like they pulled the sound effect files straight out of the TV show and put them in the game, but the music was an original track that was fitting to the settings. You didn’t hear music too often in the game, but when it was added they managed to keep it from being distracting and able to bring out the different scenes.

Replayability

Aside from the horde mode they have in the game menu, the campaign itself has replayability. Sure, you can’t replay the missions, but they allow you to revisit any level you want and then to do whatever you want to do in those levels. Take out your grudge on a specific faction by visiting their level more than once and wiping out the crew if you want. Go back and see if you could infiltrate an enemy base better with a different strategy, now that you know the levels layout better. The gameplay options are up to you and always able to be changed.

What Could Be Better

It would have been nice to get a better way to see when a weapon is about to break. You could check on it when you look at the inventory, but I often found myself losing a gun due to it breaking suddenly and scrambling to get a different weapon at the ready. A hovering meter would have done amazingly in those times.

While I thought the tutorial was really well done, it would have been nice to have been given advice to improve the gameplay. As someone who hasn’t had the change to play many shooter titles in VR before, I didn’t even think to use both hands on handguns or actually look down the sights because I didn’t think they would be actual options. You already had a guy in the tutorial talking to us, so why not mention that we could do things like that during the gun practice section?

Conclusion

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is an amazing VR game experience and one that I plan to go back into time and time again! I can see why it was a nominated title for this years Game Awards because it is a lot of fun while being challenging. It was interesting to be in the position where I had to make decisions that affects how two factions interactions would turn out and I loved that they included so many small details in the game that really brought it to life.