Reviews
[Review] ‘World War Z’ is a Slight But Entertaining Apocalyptic Shooter
The dead are up and running for you! Find out if the chase is thrilling in Bloody Disgusting’s World War Z review for PS4.
How about this then. A co-op shooter based on a questionable six-year-old movie adaptation of a pretty good book is actually pretty good itself. That’s World War Z, and it’s one of the most surprising games of the year so far. If not without its problems.
Yes, World War Z is a 4 player co-op third-person shooter based on the lackluster Brad Pitt movie of the same name, but the strongest aspect of that film carries over into the game, the horde. You play as one of a group of survivors/soldiers trying to escape a zombie horde, and that horde can surge into one big tidal wave of bodies that can swell over walls and obstacles through sheer hungry force.
The film didn’t make it quite the intimidating spectacle it should have been, but World War Z the game makes sure you know just how bad shit is about to get when you see a column of undead bursting toward your place of relative safety. Sure, you’re armed, and sure, you can pick a few zombies off easily before they reach you, but if you don’t coordinate with your teammates, that horde is going overwhelm you pretty quick.
What works in its favor is that it emulates Left 4 Dead, and Left 4 Dead is clearly well…deceased at this point so something had to step in that exact void eventually (yes, you could kind of count Vermintide or Call of Duty’s Zombies to a degree, but WWZ is just a bit closer). You go from objective to objective to get past several scenarios per stage (there are four stages; New York, Jerusalem, Moscow, and Tokyo). So find a key here, turn a handle there, that kind of thing. There’s usually a few sections in each where you must defend the area you’re in from large numbers of the undead for a certain amount of time, then leg it to the next area before you’re overrun. Employing traps, turrets, and flitting between pockets of safety to prevent yourself from being torn to shreds.
It’s a simple, yet highly effective pattern, with the erratic savagery of the undead and human error lending each encounter a decent amount of unpredictability. During the New York stage there’s a section where you and your teammates must work your way up from the underground as swathes of zombies rain down from an opening high above you like giant rotting hail. It’s a bizarre nightmare vision, showing how there’s nowhere this threat won’t try to reach you.
Even though there’s much chaos and gunfire, you can rely on a little stealth too. melee attacks and weapons such as silenced pistols and crossbows can keep you from being besieged in smaller areas, but it relies on communication and understanding with your teammates to stick to quiet means. The more noise you make the more chance bigger groups of zombies show up (though the true hordes still tend to be left for the appropriate moments). The downside is with strangers it’s a lot harder to communicate that, and what could be fairly routine can be turned into a blood-soaked disaster. Part of the fun of course, but also potentially irritating.
Impressive hordes aren’t just garden variety undead. In true Left 4 Dead fashion, there’s special enemy types that can ruin your day. Riot Gear-clad ‘Bulls’ can charge players and batter them to death, sneaky ‘Creepers’ hide in the shadows before rushing at unsuspecting players and pinning them to the ground while they slash away with sharpened talons. ‘Shriekers’ have megaphones fused to their bodies to amplify their scream (it’s a game dammit, don’t question it), creating a whole lot of noise and thus bring a lot of zombies your way until they’re shut up permanently. There’s more, but these are among the more common ones to show up and make a bad day worse.
Should any of these ghouls best you, then you go into a downed state with limited time to be rescued by teammates. You can respawn if not, but that’s also limited and the lengthy time you’re away gives the remaining players a distinct disadvantage. Communication with people is obviously important in these situations and weighing up the options does mean it might be best to leave a player to respawn instead of weakening your team’s defense to go on a rescue mission. A solid strategy and good teamwork should make such situations a rarity though.
The only issue with that comes when you’re in a team with just two or three player-controlled teammates. if your human-controlled teammate wanders off, they can often take the A.I. with them, and the A.I. just isn’t smart enough to make a choice in that decision, meaning you have to endure frustration and failure through little fault of your own. Creepers love pouncing on those who stray too far from the group too, so again, without communication, the dynamic can be skewed a bit too far off course.
So World War Z is mostly a good time, but the drawbacks, unfortunately, prevent it from being great. The four play areas are intense and highly entertaining to go through a couple of times, but there’s just not a lot of meat to the game’s bones, so the shelf life is rather limited compared to most multiplayer efforts. You can upgrade your classes and weapons to take on higher difficulty settings, but really, there’s not enough to warrant that sort of time investment. A killer blow in some respects, but given the price point is not all that high, it’s not the worst crime to be guilty of.
The gunplay is a touch wonky in places, especially when trying to take on smaller groups of undead. it’s always fun and hilarious to decimate the larger horde, there’s something a little less satisfying about dealing with anything smaller due to the aforementioned gunplay wonkiness. Again, it’s not a terrible problem, but does knock back the game’s chances of being something more.
I can’t really complain about the presentation. It isn’t all that special in truth, and there’s been a fair few little technical hiccups, but once again, really nothing overly damaging, and the cutbacks taken to achieve the feat of large zombie hordes are mostly smart ones.
Finally, World War Z may well step into the vacant shoes of Left 4 Dead in a more literal manner than similar titles do, but it’s easily the least inspired leap from that winning formula. It does the job, is a good time with friends and has some pretty impressive spectacle, but it doesn’t exactly rip up any trees on the innovation front. Not that it has to. It’s obviously still enjoyable as it is, but it doesn’t stand out in the same way something like Vermintide does.
What World War Z does well is provide straightforward co-op action that entertains and enthralls, even if it is just in the short term. It has plenty of rough edges, but developer Saber Interactive has been fairly clever about where it has allowed those edges to be. Being a zombie shooter in 2019 is probably the stalest kind of game to be, but World War Z proves that staleness needn’t matter if you ensure enjoyment is high on your list of priorities
World War Z review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
World War Z is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Books
‘Scary Movie Night’ Review: A Hitchcock-Themed Thriller Full of Juicy Twists But Not Much Else
A secluded mansion. A group of friends each harboring secrets. A party built around one woman’s love of Alfred Hitchcock. These are the ingredients laid out to begin Scary Movie Night, the sophomore novel from Miranda Smith and follow-up to her breakout debut, Smile for the Cameras.
They’re all, standing alone and taken together, very promising ingredients, and when Smith starts to bounce all those secrets and all that seclusion around with a little murder in the mix, they make for some juicy plotting. But fun twists and macabre themed party nights do not a thriller make. There is fun to be had here, but for all its reliance on classic horror tropes and the films of a master of cinematic suspense, Scary Movie Night never quite finds a way to become something more.
Movie blogger and influencer Tippi (yes, she’s named for Tippi Hedren from The Birds) is going through a rough patch. Her upcoming marriage was just called off, and she’s planning to hit the Cannes Film Festival then travel the world as a newly single woman, even shifting her career focus from movies to travel in the process. Her friends Ava, Marlowe, and Constance are supportive, but they also know it might be the last time they see Tippi for a while, so master party planner Ava comes up with the perfect sendoff: A themed scary movie night party, complete with costumes, hosted at the elegant estate of Tippi’s grandmother, Marmee.
Marmee, you see, has her own history with the glamour of Hollywood, and even has a private cinema set up in her mansion. It’s the perfect venue for the perfect night, at least until Tippi starts receiving vaguely threatening notes from her ex, and the first body turns up.
See what I mean about all the ingredients being there? This book starts with so much promise, particularly when guests turn up for the party and reveal their various movie costumes. There’s so much to chew on, and Smith wastes no time diving directly into the drama of it all. The book moves primarily through Tippi’s first-person perspective, so we get the lowdown on her friends, their various relationships, the quarrels that have defined previous social interactions, and much more. It’s a series of rich veins all tapped at once, and it feels like the book is genuinely going somewhere quite fun.
Here’s the thing: The book does go somewhere quite fun; it just gets there in a way that I found both frustrating and often unfulfilling. The characters aren’t defined by their choices in the book so much as they’re defined by what Tippi tells us about each of them, and while the notion of Tippi as an unreliable narrator is key to the plot, her supporting cast never really gets a chance to sit up and exist as anything other than archetypes in her head. The dialogue doesn’t help matters in this regard, and I kept finding myself wishing one of Tippi’s friends would just seize the narrative, just for a moment, so I’d get some sense of these people beyond the broad brushstrokes of the protagonist.
Which brings us to the issue of Tippi as the narrator in the first place. Like the Hitchcock blondes on which she’s clearly modeled, we’re meant to learn about her through her choices, and constantly question whether or not she’s made the right ones. Why did she leave her ex with a wedding looming? Why is she changing career paths? Why does she have to be talked into her own going-away party? How she reacts to these things, and what she’s really after, will be what defines her, but here’s the thing: Tippi, for all her Hitchcockian layers of plotting, never steps forward as a fully formed character. Like the Hitch films playing in the background during the party, she’s more like a suggestion of a character than a person.
Writing first-person present-tense is tricky under the best of circumstances, but doing it when your protagonist is meant to be harboring secrets of her own is especially challenging, and it just…never quite entirely works here, and drawing very direct parallels between her and Hitchcock’s various leading ladies doesn’t really help matters.
But here’s the really interesting part: I wouldn’t be invested in any of these issues were it not for a story that genuinely kept me reading. For all of this book’s shortcomings, and I found a few, it ultimately holds together because Smith has a genuine gift for plot twists, and secrets, and the kind of juicy drama that makes a thriller keep barreling forward on the page. There’s good stuff in here, even if it’s sometimes overshadowed by missteps, and that means that while Scary Movie Night might not obsess you or give you nightmares or stick in your head for weeks on end, it will entertain you. I wanted more from this book, but I also want to see what Miranda Smith writes next, and that’s an achievement in itself.
Scary Movie Night is available July 14 wherever books are sold.
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