The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

It’s an experience so rich, rewarding, and interactively creative that it’s likely you’ll want to keep playing long after the last mission, just to lay waste to enemies using upgraded gear, or try out a previously ignored weapon. Most VR games don’t have legs like this, and it’s what pushes The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners into that vaunted category of must-buy PS VR titles.

It's rarely I can say this but for me The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners had dragged the VR platform forward. With its perfect VR implementation, its brilliant control scheme and its visceral combat, it a pure joy to play. A nasty, gruesome edge of the seat joy but a joy nonetheless. Brilliant.

Bottom line, Skydance Interactive has undoubtedly created the deepest VR experience to date with The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is for people who want to test their mettle living in the world of The Walking Dead, both physically and emotionally. It can be a heavy game, and returning to camp empty-handed or failing someone you were trying to help can be mentally defeating. Numerous gameplay systems work together to create one of the most intense and immersive survival experiences in VR, held back only somewhat by dated technology. If you can muster up the fortitude try and survive in this world, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is an essential VR experience that speaks volumes to the unique possibilities of virtual reality.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is not a perfect game, but it's an incredibly fun one. With satisfying and brutal combat, open-ended areas to explore, and fun survival and crafting mechanics, the title is a blast to play. It may be removed from the quality it can reach on the PC, but this is the full experience and works surprisingly well. No matter the sacrifices and minor annoyances, I kept coming back to the game long after I was done with it. I've spent more time in the headset for S&S than I have with many other games. Even though it's late in the PS4 life cycle, Saints & Sinners is a standout title.

Zombies, survival elements and a brutal combat system is a great foundation. Moreover, with advanced control and detailed environments, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a top VR-game in most regards. The fact that Playstation VR and the old Move controls are capable of such an advanced game is impressive, even though some necessary compromises are hard to ignore.

Despite some clunkiness of the control system, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a fun and challenging VR survival game that is also a case for not judging a book by its cover. Bored as I am with Robert Kirkman’s zombie series, there’s no reason to not add this to your PSVR collection.

It’s pretty unforgiving, in that restoring health can only ever be done via scarce consumables, and firearms and their ammo are also incredibly rare. Nonetheless, each mission is a tense delight. You’ll mostly walk to conserve stamina and avoid drawing attention, yet rasslin’ zombies is unavoidable, and you’ll want to be done before the town bells ring. Throw in humans both friendly and unfriendly – who will sometimes even fight among themselves – and you have a wonderfully oppressive, unpredictable world. And, yes, you get to slather yourself in guts. Yay! [Issue#176, p.78]

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners would be a great game even if it wasn't in VR.

Saints & Sinners delivers a tense fight for survival in VR with crafting-focus and some blemishes like inadequate explanations of relevant mechanics or poor AI.

Much of what holds back The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners on PS4 is the hardware. The game does its best to work around these limitations, but it only ends up hindering the overall immersion. Sure, the story is lacking in its narrative as you go through the game without any real attachments to the characters, but there’s just something so satisfying about kitting out and heading into a zombie-infested world.

An impressively ambitious survival horror that moves beyond the realm of mere VR tech demo and, despite some technical limitations, is a hugely engrossing game in its own right.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners could have been a good VR survival game, but its shortcomings are too numerous to really appeal to anybody but the most hardcore of fans.