One lone zombie is nothing to fear. It is just a shambling sack of rotten meat, noxious fumes, and bone that hungers for live flesh. They are slow, they meander, and one can easily shoot/stab/immolate/(insert verb here) them. But when zombies arrive in a group, they become another beast entirely. One may liken them to a school of piranhas—they ebb and flow as a hungry and violent mass who leave blood, confusion, and pain in their wake. Therefore, the horde must be avoided. It demands to be feared, but sometimes it must be confronted. Enter Saber Interactive’s World War Z—it is a cooperative horde-based shooter in a similar vein as Left 4 Dead or Warhammer: Vermintide 2.
Unlike those latter two titles, World War Z is intimately focused on the concept of raving, massive zombie hordes—mainly taking cues from the 2013 film of the same name. The zombies move like a displaced ant colony, they climb on top of one another to reach higher places and act as a collective rather than an individual. This makes World War Z very different in feel and experience than a Killing Floor or Left 4 Dead title. World War Z makes the horde scary…very scary. Successful co-op horror is a tall task and Saber Interactive, in my humble opinion, nailed it.
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What makes the horde so immediately frightening in World War Z is, in part, the horde itself, but more importantly it is the calm before the storm that is the horde, it is the last-minute desperate attempts at fortifying your last stand area before the horde arrives, and it is the silence that permeates in the time before all is lost to muzzle flashes and gaping, gibbering undead maws. The last stand is something we’ve seen in horror for decades upon decades—from Ash preparing his weapons in the cabin in Evil Dead 2 to Leon barricading doors in the house in Resident Evil 4. These moments are tense, they hint at what is to come, and they show the human ingenuity that kicks in when one is backed into a corner and their survival instincts kick in. Similar moments arrive at key points in World War Z to a devastating effect.
Take, for example, the first last stand segment in the opening mission of the game. The four-player party has just fought tooth and nail through the bowels of a large mall in New York City to be spit out into the mall’s colossal atrium. Beyond the metal fence and glass doors that separate the mall from the city streets is a roving mass of zombies, and as they move, they turn away from the mall and keep heading down the street farther into the city’s business district. Okay, crisis averted. The party needs to open the mall’s doors to make it to the subway and doing so triggers a countdown clock. T-minus 1:00 until the horde arrives…okay.
The reality of what is about to happen starts to sink in, stomachs start to twist in anxiety, and now it is time to prepare. Players part ways and set up automated turrets facing down to stairways, others grab ammo and health, and the last player sets up a player-controlled .50 caliber machine gun emplacement. Thirty-five seconds until the horde arrives and there is nothing left to do but wait. The waiting—the calm before the storm—is the worst part. Players do not speak to one another for they are nervous about what is to come, mentally preparing for the inevitable slaughter, and thinking about the fact that the odds are stacked against them and the last checkpoint was just far enough away to cause announce should they all be consumed by the horde.
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Still, the silence. It is tangible. Nothing is heard but the diegetic sound of the mall and a city in apocalyptic flux. Seconds pass, but they feel like eons. Eventually, a rising sound is heard, it is the sound of footsteps and wailing. The horde is close. The silence breaks but the fear lingers and, though out of engagement distance, the horde can still be seen coming closer and closer. The reality of the situation sinks in and there is nothing left to do but commit to what is to come, no matter how it ends. Seeing the horde approach is an individual horror in and of itself—death embodied is close, but players can yet do nothing to stymie it. The horde is an open wound yet to happen, but is unable to be prevented. More time passes. The horde bursts, like a tornado of limbs and teeth, into the mall.
A few minutes pass. Gunfire drowns out any other noise, teamwork buckles under the sheer intensity of surviving against the horde. Players hold the line until the line breaks, they fall back, do the same, and rinse and repeat. Limbs separate from bodies, heads implode under the brunt of baseball bats, and undead faces escape through the back of undead heads as bullets punch fresh holes into the rotted brains of the horde. There is only chaos—a cacophony of violence that is as bombastic as it is intimate. But the players survive. The horde lies motionless and dead as players finish off any stray zombies. The madness is over, the silent horror before the chaos is over and the chaos, itself, has come to pass. Now, there is a second silence, but this silence is not scary. It is triumphant. It is the silent acceptance of fleeting victory as players realize that they can make it to the next objective and, though victory feels good, there is still the underlying dread that this last stand was only the first of many.