WWI Z VR sounds like a deathmatch made in heaven, but our time in the preview build already feels some strict mortis to us.
Flatscreen World War Z is a good cooperative zombie shooter game, so joining this VR and participating in the World War I Z experience, I had high hopes. Instead, the results shattered hopes like a zombie skull.
For our younger readers, when the console generation felt like a miraculous leap in technology, previous generations will still get these strange ports of current games. Developers had to effectively remake the game from scratch, except for some of the assets. These are obviously compromised, but still compromised try Capture the same experience. Sometimes you’ll be lucky! Other times? You’ll get Call of Duty: World at War – Final Fronts. This was not incredible.
My time in World War I Z VR is unfortunately classified as the latter.
The preview lets you play tutorials and one story mission, white noise. I played the latter in all difficulty settings.
The strange thing is how the tutorial makes World War I Z VR a truly unique VR spinoff. You are an unknown new character. There is a slow pace. The stealth is strongly emphasized, except for the final rush of nearby enemies. You might think that he feels like Brad Pitt in the World War I Z movie. A neat idea, but the whole atmosphere stops the second to leave the tutorial.
World War I Z VR is just a mashup to the 2019 flat game, but it’s not that good. It’s completely functional and great, but very average? This mission sends 3 characters from the previous game something;You play as one of them, shoot some Zekes (see Zombies), and call it a day.
In my case, despite being set in Tokyo, there is only one character from the original Japanese campaign, along with one NYC survivor and one Israeli soldier. They are hot on the path of men that could be key to creating a vaccine against zombie infection. To get his attention, I had to move with my team to Radio Tower in Tokyo and then protect it from Zeke.
The level design consists of several boxed arenas and safe corridors to restock safe areas. Sometimes, for spices, you may have two lanes to choose from. Each route reconnected after an instant, or one brought a dead end with several supplies. Rinse and repeat this flow until the final holdout to protect the radio tower. The storytelling dialogue is not particularly surprising, and plays a very interesting role.
It was a World War I Z experience, but it was hollowed out. There are fewer interesting options to make as a player, fewer weapons, and fewer zombies. It’s just a shame.
Also, since the two NPC companions have no brain at all, you need to wonder if this is always single player only. They are unhappy with the environment, have a hard time dodging the enemy to the easiest difficulties, and you have no way to command them. They only stand occasionally, feeding the dead alive. Often, scripts throw their hands and teleport. But if you want extra firepower in the strange moments they help you, you must heal these two fools with your precious and limited use healing spray.
Accessibility is also a strange conversation. The paper has many options, but the balance of gameplay is not finely tuned for those who need a more realistic reload. I started with realism control/immersive settings as it should be for those with the most VR experience. However, the tempo of the battle is clearly favorable, using a simplified reloading system that simply involves slapping the gun into the chest and reloading it instantly. You can also enable the “fishing line” option, as it is not quite reliable to throw realistic hand-ren bullets.
There’s nothing implemented on its own, such as a terrible implementation of manual reloading. In fact, reloading the shotgun manually here is especially good over several other recent releases. The problem is that manual reloads are slow and incompetent teammates count every second. And basically, it’s impossible to effectively double-wield the gun without a simplified reload.
What about the Horde? Look, I understand that my quest 3 cannot match World War I Z. Aftermath can definitely reduce the amount of Zeke to drop your chin. I’m not asking for that. However, the final horde of white noise is somewhat overwhelming towards the end of the final stand, even if it is stiff. Level designs make them stand out so intentionally, that Zeke’s prominence is often your mercy, not your threat. It’s difficult to try and avoid those few in a limited space. That’s only if you’re stealing ammunition. The lack of melee weapons is most prominent at these moments.
But at the end of the mission, my party of zombie hunters proudly declares that they must have taken out “half” of Tokyo’s entire undead population. We dodged perhaps Thousands of cities, not thousands of people. Yes, in the distance there were sprites trying to portray more from nearby buildings, but they were obviously for the show. The presentation goals were not connected to the reality of gameplay. If this is both on a large scale and…well, take a look at this:
This is the main character who fights alongside the entire mission, not the random background characters. They aren’t so bad, but the compromise that runs smoothly on quest hardware has become more obvious the longer I play. I’d like to at least hope that the release of steam VR will look better, but that raises doubts: why didn’t they move in the direction of VR’s more stylized art? If performance occurs at this considerable cost, then something that is suitable for low poly counts is much better.
That’s the frustrating part – the glory of what should be an obvious slam dunk. There is nothing fundamentally broken here. Not as good as the sauce material. I’m sure someone will play this and have something a bit more fun, but Saber can do more than bassline entertainment. That’s why the first World War Z-Game was first placed on the map. I can look It’s a ghost of a game I once loved, but it just bumped into it so much by the decision to make it few fun.
There are no crates with unique deployables, but you get a key that can only be used to unlock predefined defenses that do not change regardless of difficulty. Heavy weapons cannot be stored in your person, even though the left shoulder is not used as a weapon slot. Melee combat should be the highlight of VR, but melee combat will push Zeke in with your gun. Seriously, imagine a VR chainsaw! As I said before, the dual wildings only actually work with one style of reload, and the pathetic amount of ammunition available discourages it.
So, essentially, it didn’t change between three different playthroughs of the same mission, besides the special zombie spawn type. For games built on the value of replays, that’s a big problem. Some upgrades to the skill tree require you to play the mission again on the hard, but the difference between the medium and hard is almost noticeable, meaning you play the mission twice. You are yourself, so there’s no excuse to play missions with friends who just picked up the game.
I don’t understand. Saber has been at the top of the game for several years. To be fair, if you say this is an early alpha, I would call it a decent start. With the exception of this game, it will start in a few weeks. I’d probably want to believe that Saber will turn things around with post-release updates. However, it is not clear whether most players have that kind of patience. I’m worried that only the most dedicated fans of World War I will be trying to get something from now on.
The First World War Z VR was released on August 12, 2025 and has been pre-ordered in store for Steam and Meta.
