The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners (2020)

Played on Meta Quest 3. Completed Main and Aftershocks DLC.

This is kind of a simple loop but everything works well. The grind is not (usually) too grindy. I mostly understood what was expected from me.

I guess my thing is, it is very redundant but whenever it strays from the normal formula and tries to do puzzles and whatnot I get confused or annoyed. It got to where near the end of the DLC as soon as there was any "what am I supposed to do" I just jumped right to Google.

Still, this is an older VR game. It looks decent and it is not very buggy and I did not get any crashes. Which is rare for me in VR! It is pretty easy to push because it is not too hard or too scary or too... anything. It is just fine!

Started up again. Went into the first area through boat travel. There I met a woman who gave me one of my few first quests, at least not counting that of the quests you get from the intro character. This first area got me good a few times. I was snuck up on by some of the zombies at times, and it gave me a good scare! Really creepy spot, and sometimes hard to sneak past or rush past zombies without getting too close for them to grab you, considering all the cars and junk in the way at times.

I did also notice a few things I didn't notice the first time I opened up the game... One being that there is actually an option to have your real voice through the mic come through in the game. So, making it more of a challenge, as if the zombies hear you, they will start to come for you. I thought that was awesome and might use that setting at a future time. Also, when you die (yes, I died...lol ) you drop your items and respawn at the boat you traveled in on. If you can't pick up your stuff before dying again, you lose it permanently. An interesting thing to add a bit of stress to the game. Because why not? Haha

I'd read that the ending of Aftershocks was disappointing but I didn't expect it to be such an anticlimax. I also read that the story was light and with weak characters, but in reality there is no story and no new characters.

I am a bit confused because when I started retribution, the recap claimed that at the end of the first game "new allies" and new places opened up, but that's also not true? Did I play the right game?

I keep playing the end game for some reason. The Aftershocks DLC doesn't seem to have a story and is just "go the the place and the a backpackful of loot", but it is fun.

I realise now that the reason I don't mind the crafting is that there's no crafting tree and that most craft items are useless. I do t get why I would want to craft any of those big clumsy double-handed guns. The starting pistol is small, quick to draw and reload, and perfectly adequate for killing zombies and humans. The big rifle alerts enemies as it inevitably gets caught in the world geometry, is slow to reload and unwieldy to use.

The same goes for the big melee weapons. The national guard knife is cheap to make, durable, and as better than most at brainig zombies. Why woudl I need a huge bat with razorwire on the tip?

Anyway, that aside it's still fun to sneak around and knife enemies to death and combat can still be frenetic and exiting.

A survival/crafting game has to hook me good for me to play it until end credits, so this has to be something special. But I've been trying to understand why and I can't. On paper this game sucks. Small and samey environments that the story missions make you revisit too many times, forgettable story that's undermined by a bunch of bugs that ruin any important choice you made.

I think it's just that the slow pace and deliberate combat felt really good. Weapon degradation actually works in this game (shock!) because it makes you feel always vulnerable and keeps you hunting for crafting elements; particularly if, like me, you shoot straight through the critical path instead of wasting your time scavenging.

Finished the main story with a very disappointing ending thanks to the general bugginess and stiffness of the game.

I can save Casey by flooding the armoury or I can flood everything. But apparently I can't flood the armoury to save Casey and then flood the rest; the game artificially locks the controls. Great.

Then I get a confrontation between May wanting to ring the bell and Casey pointing his gun at her. I try to take Casey's gun, cut the rope, stand between them, but the game doesn't even register my natural attempts at problem solving and Casey kills May. Frustrated by all this, I ring the bell and say fuck everything.

For all that this game does well, it's in pretty rough shape code-wise. I get the option of either killing the leader of one faction or warning him about an ambush. I warn him and he wants to go guns blazing so he gets killed. And then, the same people that kill him thanks me for killing him. Ok, weird. But now both factions are against me in the end game instead of one of them helping them like they promised.

Reading the forums, this mission seems to be bugged as hell. Almost every thing that can go wrong has gone wrong for some players.

The game is pretty well put together. The survival feels survival-y in that I'm almost always running out of weapons and always feel like needing to scavenge everything I see. The combat is feel weighty and crunchy.

I don't know if it's my style of game, though. A lot of focus on crafting, from which I get zero enjoyment. and the level structure is kind of weird. Lot's of small areas that feel very similar with one or two POI that I guess you're supposed to revisit a lot to build up supplies?

I also can report that I don't feel sick with smooth turning any more. Between getting used to it and learning the trick of turning a bit IRL right before turning in VR, I think I finally have my full VR legs.

I've been looking for a survival scavenging game in VR for a while and decided to take the plunge with Saints & Sinners despite being easily scared by zombies and horror in general.

I think i've already experienced the best the game has to offer after realising that I could open kitchen cupboards and drawers, can the whole game just be opening containers please?

On a more serious note the melee combat is really satisfying. Merely stabbing a zombie in the head isn't enough, once the object has peirced the skin you have to drive the weapon home so that it fully penetrates... it's quite gruesome but they've nailed the feel.

I've really just bought this game to focus on scavenging and crafting, I plan to mod it tomorrow so that I have infinite health and stamina because I really don't care for the horror / stress aspect. I'll probably even try to reduce the number of zombies that can spawn in to a level too, or completely remove them in favour of human NPCs.

I wish more games like this would be made for PSVR or VR in general. By games like this I mean games with some actual depth and gameplay, rather than experiences where we pick up a banana and that's about it, because the devs think we'd be amazed that we can do things like that in VR or something. I also really like VR physics based games, and the way melee weapons connect with the zombies feels pretty satisfying, Coupled with the stamina system, the game also organically avoids making the protagonist too strong (unlike, say, Skyrim, where you're a weapon of mass destruction if equipped with a bow, as you can spam as many attacks as you physically can manage). The bow and arrow is also very strong in this game, with the way it auto-targets, sort of jankily teleporting the arrow in the victims head. This has the weird effect of rendering firearms completely useless, as they are loud, harder to aim and can't get back the ammo the way you can recover arrows.

The way the story is told is also pretty good, way above average for VR games, and the multiple choice story, while not groundbreaking for gaming in general, is something that hasn't really been done in VR this way.

For me, one of the highlights of the game was when I was in a fight, freaking out, panicking while trying to reload a revolver fast. Yeah, having to actually reload the weapon, rather than just pressing a button is actually much harder, especially whilst in the middle of a firefight.

That being said, the game seems to lack polish, at least on PSVR. The AI is incredibly stupid, especially when the game has to load a lot of human NPCs (meaning more than 5 in my case, at least). There was this really comical fight between the two competing factions in the game where members of the team would just materialize out of thin air, and the characters would forget they were in a fight, only to awkwardly remember a few minutes later and then forget again. Not to mention that if you pass by the characters, they almost always blurt out: Who's sneaking around? And mind you this is while playing the game on a PS5, so I don't think it's the technical limitations - or at least I sincerely hope so. I also had a weapon become unusable due to a bug. The game is also a tad too easy. Saints&Sinners uses a day cycle, where you have to go back to camp before the bells ring. I waited a few times to see what would happen if I stayed up late and what happened was that ominous music played, two zombies came and I killed them, and then I remained alone in the middle of the map with the ominous music. Overall, however, I think this is about the best thing you can have on PSVR. I liked it, and I don't particularly like survival crafting games or The Walking Dead series. Shame that Saints&Sinners 2 doesn't look all that great.