The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

There’s a lot to juggle in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, but it’s not a bad thing since each feature adds a layer of survivalism and immersion. Though certain weapons are uncomfortable, and there’s that NPC audio issue, it’s likely due to being the first available build of the game. The lack of physical crouching is irritating, but the combat, climbing, stealth, and RPG mechanics make up for it, putting you in near-complete control of the character. Every suspenseful moment is an addiction, and it’s an incredible experience all neatly packaged for you to slowly unwrap.

Tense and thrilling with finely tuned systems, Saints & Sinners is a must-have VR experience.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a faithful VR adaptation that creatively knows what it’s like to fight walkers and stay alive.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a game exclusively playable in virtual reality. It immediately puts other games of this type in the background thanks to its quality workmanship and realistic physics which greatly reinforce the feeling of immersion.

From the very beginning, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners offers a satisfying zombie experience that’s hard to match. Titles like Arizona Sunshine easily fill that need for straight-up arcade action, for when you want a living dead apocalypse with a bit more depth then The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is your new go-to videogame. With a good 15+ hours of content depending on how slow and methodical you are, the atmosphere and superb physics make a nice cohesive whole.

At the end of the day, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a satisfying action RPG with reasonable writing, fun scenarios, and the opportunity to hit zombies with barbed wire baseball bats. That it happens competently in VR makes me feel good about the future of such experiences, even if there are some usability troubles. If you’ve already got a headset, giving Saints & Sinners a shot is a no brainer. If you’re still on the fence, well, it might be about time to hop down.

Technical issues aside, The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is generally a good time and one of the better VR horror games on the market. The level of interactivity alone makes it a game that many VR enthusiasts will want to check out, though expect to be frustrated by the poorly-implemented stealth mechanics and human combat encounters.

The best game I’ve played on VR, just buy it, it’s a bit expensive but it’s really good if you like the concept and if you don’t it’s still really good

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners attempts to bring a more traditionally AAA experience to the Quest 2 - it's a 'proper' game with a respectably long story and strong game mechanics. On the gameplay side, it mostly delivers. The melee combat is visceral and satisfying, and although the gunplay took me some practice to get used to, it too is great fun. Looting dark buildings with the threat of walkers around every corner is tense, and fighting larger groups of them out in the open can give you quite a rush. Escaping from an unbeatable horde by the skin of your teeth can be a truly intense experience. Fighting human enemies isn't always as satisfying, as their AI is pretty laughable at times. I've been crouched right below someone, pointing a gun to their face and they were completely unaware of my presence. At other times though, they can shoot you with pinpoint accuracy. Frustratingly, the game can be quite buggy and otherwise just janky in places. I've had to follow a character into battle only for him to get stuck on an obstacle and leave me to fight alone. Later in that same mission, I suddenly left my body and floated in the air, unable to move, see my arms or do anything but reload a save. My tracking was working fine so I can only assume this was the game at fault rather than the hardware. Annoyances like these crop up quite frequently, and there were plenty of minor graphical glitches too. Speaking of, the graphics are okay for a game of this size running on the Quest 2. It looks about as good as you could expect from a portable headset, but the art style is so grey and plain that the environments can get a little tiring. The story is decent; being able to make my own decisions kept me invested in it, and I appreciate the freedom you have in deciding the fates of everyone. You can kill every NPC you come across, including those with more prominent roles in the story. You're given a few choices at the end of the game but it wraps up so quickly that you don't get to feel the ramifications of anything - a more fleshed out conclusion would've been great. Even so, the final mission is full of action and it's really fun. It ups the stakes and moves at an exciting pace. Overall, I liked Saints & Sinners. It has its issues - bugs and boring, samey environments chief among them - but it's mechanics are really strong. The catharsis of braining a walker or blasting someone away with a pump shotgun is amplified by physics which inject physicality and a bit of realism into the game's combat. It's a pretty fun title. Played on Oculus Quest 2.

As for the VR tech side of it, it's a great game, but it's got some majorly annoying design decisions. Looks like a large part of the effort was spent on making fighting zombies feel good while dealing with other human characters was put on the back burner and it shows. The 'stealth' mechanics' are horrible, combat with humans feels equally painful to deal with. Crafting is neat but collecting the materials begins to feel tedious as it's all just a ton of random junk to fill your inventory with. The levels all mostly look the same with a few large structures to make an area feel unique.

Try to make this short and sweet if I can. Played using a Intel i9 9900K, 16GB DDR4-3200, 2080Ti, 2TB nVME, and Oculus Rift CV1 with quad sensors. Game version is the Update #5. First the good parts. inventory system works pretty well. Decent amount of starting space. Performance is decent and I haven't had any technical issues. Killing zombies feels satisfying enough. Not as good as Blade and Sorcery though. Locations feel decently real in their layout and design. Upgrade and crafting system are handled well. Not the best but simple and engaging enough. Bandaging system is pretty cool...having to physically wrap the bandage is pretty immersive. Defintely a first and great VR choice. -------- Now the mediocre: Graphics are not impressive in the slightest. Very cartoony approach (think the Telltales games) and the textures and models are very low quality. The level of detail draw distance is also horrible. Things like vehicles will dramatically tranform their quality several times as you approach within like 15 feet. Super noticeable and for such low quality graphics already having everything be max quality all the time would take very little performance hit. Resource gathering and collecting is pretty ho-hum. It works well enough but all you're practically doing 90% of the time playing is just collection bullstuff, dropping off bullstuff one by one in your little recycling bin, then going out to refill on more bullstuff...rinse and repeat. I'm not necessarily marking this as "bad" because it does work well and hunting and gathering can lead to interesting locations and areas but it's still a slog game play wise and time wise. Weapons feel OK but just ****'t expect anything past very basic combat and interactions there in. The world while seemingly interesting and mysterious is pretty shallow with very little to actually do outside resource gathering or the occasional side mission. -------- Now onto the bad and there's a good bit: Stamina system is garbage. I get maybe the running part but my arms gettign tired should depend on my own arms...I don't get tired after swinging a knife a few times. The stamina bar takes too long to refill and the permanent drain of it just limits this poor system even more. Health is handled poorly as well. You take too much damage and it too has a deminishing "max" just like the stamina bar. The weapons have a use limit before breaking but the limit is ridiculous. Not that I've EVER agreed with mechanics like these (show me any steel knife that literally becomes useless after even 100 uses!) but this game takes it too far. A crowbar breaks. A crowbar can survive a nuclear blast. The level of interaction and things to do pretty much ****. You gather resources and maybe help/kill some random NPC. The story is pretty weak and everything just feels so...empty. So video game like. Once I got sick of repetitous resource gathering and just used a trainer for unlimited resources the game was fun for like an hour before there was just nothing left to do or accomplish. Sure I cheated and unlocked late level stuff early but my God...I couldn't imagine playing long enough or caring enough to unlock half this stuff. In other works, it's just there to pad the game out. There's a bunch of other little minor annoyances as well like no head mounted light, no way to adjust the position of anything on your person like your item slots, gotta unload inventory items one by one...just little stuff the break the immersion of a VR game. -------- So yeah over all it's just OK...barely. Sure production values are higher than most but it's still a mediocre game and experience still. Graphics are pretty bad, weapons and weapon handling is pretty poor, the world puts on a false sense of depth but is very shallow. Not bad for a few hours for ****'ll HAVE **** in the end I think it was pretty pointless, time consuming, and little to no reward.

Game not very good. It shouldn't have the Walking Dead Tag line. Other then the NPC looking like looters from TWD. It's just a Zombie bandit game with a bad story. I wear glass and this game is still too Dark. You will walk by so much due to so. You have a flashlight but know one wants to jerk them self every 10 - 20 sec. Best thing is killing zombie. They did do that good. When the horde of zombies come. Just run. You can't kill them all. GG 3 Bacon ~ ~ ~