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!

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.

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.