The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners (60/40$)

This is the worst I’ve done

But it was a speed drawing in 30 minutes. I tried to add a limiter to myself to see how good my skills are…. They are not good.

I fell in love with VR at first sight, and I went out and got the cheapest headset I could find.  Hated just about everything on the app store.  That was around 4 years ago, and with this year's launch of Half Life Alex, it seems the games went from “shit” to “must have.”  Oculus Quest 2 launched in October at a price point that finally made sense and I have no regrets in my thanks to games like Saints and Sinners.  Golly gee this game is freaking amazing.  At a price point of 40$, it might just be my game of the year.

The Walking Dead franchise started it’s video game career off strong with it’s story based point and click adventure games made by Telltale.  As time went on, and Telltale got complacent, the franchise suffered from lack of innovation and vision across all of it’s numerous games  This is best seen in Saints and Sinners fellow VR game; The Walking Dead Onslaught.  Onslaught is a first person gallery shooter that scraped its co-op features, was basically as good as a flash game, a riddle with technical issues.Nor did it feel good to play until the massive update they just launched a few days ago. Yet, the game still lacks some of the basic features that Saints and Sinners offers players, like dual wielding weapons.  Which is why Saints and Sinners is so great, it has thought of just about everything the player would want to do, and allows them to do it. 

The game opens with a nice tutorial section that shows the player how to survive in the world of the Walking Dead and I spent around 30 minutes killing the tutorial guide and exploring the weapon physics because they feel great to use.  Swinging an axe feels heavy compared to knives which feel quick and light.  The tutorial teaches the player how to manage their inventory, which has been tuned for VR perfectly.  Resources are scarce and get harder to find as the game goes on.  So when you have to manage your inventory space, when your gun jams, or when you have to choose between weapons to keep due to the lack of space there is a feeling of real pressure.  This is not because of tedium either. The controls to store items, find your objectives, and holster your weapons feel good to use because they don’t try to be too realistic or do too much.  The game is built around ease for the player.  You can accidentally drop weapons, but it will be your fault you didn’t do the proper holstering motion and it never feels buggy or unfair.  The player will catch themselves making rookie mistakes in the first few hours of play, which they will look back on in contempt as they cut their teeth on the streets of New Orleans which is fantastically designed.  The game opts for a similar look and feel to the telltale series, which is a smart choice since realistic games don’t look good in VR.  It still is scary too, the environments look great and the lighting is so well done that your palms will sweat as you slowly creep through the mostly abandoned city. What few inhabitants that are left are locked in a conflict the player will find themselves in the middle of, but the story is not as cliche as it sounds.  Or rather it is, but the voice acting and back stories around the characters flesh the generic story out and draw the player further into the missions.  Plus there is player choice, which adds to replay value.  There are multiple endings, but since they are the endings the player won't care much about them. Instead the missions that play out will have the player make tough calls about who to save or how much to tell.  One of the first missions in the game is a request from a former mother and wife, who lost their children to zombies and couldn’t bring herself to kill her husband as he turned.  She asks for you to dispatch him, and bring back his wedding band.  It’s a cliche story line across zombie media, but then you learn the father had to kill their two children to prevent them from turning (and there is some ambiguity on whether they were going to turn at all).  So you are faced with a choice of telling the woman, letting her live in peace with her happy memories, or killing her and taking her quest reward.  Only be sure to shoot an NPC’s you kill in the head, or they will be back as Walkers.  Thankfully the Walkers themselves are a delight to kill, stabbing into their heads feels great and snapping off your blade feels brutal.  Taking off heads with a shotgun blast feels just as satisfying as you might expect.  

I didn’t love the crafting system, as the game really forces the player to craft rather than scavenge.  Yet, the system is simple enough that the player will never really struggle with it.  It’s just sad that you can’t keep some of the weapons you find in the game.  As you progress through the game, the NPC’s get meaner, and your weapons get radder.  To include a spiked baseball bat of walking dead fame and a pistol that shoots shotgun shells.  But no matter what, the later stages of the game become too hard to conquer and the player will have to pick and end.  Which did not wow me, but serves as a good reason to restart the 15-20 hour campaign.   

VR gives Saints and Sinners an unfair advantage over other games, and the brilliant game design makes the most of that advantage.  Earning its place amongst legends like Half Life: Alex, which I stopped playing because Saints and Sinners kept me coming back.  I wish the story was longer, and there was more to-do, but only because I wanted more.  Not because I feel like I wasted my money.  There is a horde mode of sorts, but it doesn’t play nearly as good as the main story with it’s great characters and voice acting.  “Fuck you,” is almost always an option in dailog and it’s great.  The cajun accents are well done, and so are the others.  If they released a DLC for this game, it would be a day one buy.  But seeing as there are multiple endings and even better moment to moment choices to make.  Secrets to find hidden in the world, and collectables that unlock new badass weapons, it already gives a player a reason to come back.  Plus it’s not like it has much competition in the VR space.  The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners is truly in contention for my game of the year and I hope they make a non VR version of the game so everyone can see the best zombie game ever made (60/40$).