Now Playing: Arizona Sunshine (VR)

Arizona Sunshine is a VR zombie survival shooter, originally released on PC and PS4 in 2016. It’s best described as a ‘low budget Left 4 Dead’ – but what it lacks in production quality it more than makes up for with charm and character. It remains one of the most popular and highly rated VR games on Steam so, when it went on sale recently, I decided to give it a spin.

You play as an unnamed guy who awakes in a cave in Arizona in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. It’s clear he’s been surviving on his own for some time and, after hearing a garbled radio message, is now determined to track down other survivors. The campaign can be played solo or in co-op with a length of around 4-5 hours depending upon your chosen difficulty.

The campaign, though short, does a decent job of mixing up the locations, so you’ll always be encountering something new. It also drops new weapons into your path to help spice things up. Visually, Arizona Sunshine may be a little dated – and it really needed more zombie models – but thanks to some clever level design and humorous VA, most players will likely be willing to overlook the low budget visual quality.

Every level follows a familiar, Left 4 Dead style gameplay loop in which you’ll traverse a zombie infested zone, dealing with the occasional surge, before eventually arriving at a trigger point in which some kind of alarm will sound and a mass zombie horde will arrive. It’s a repetitive but effective pattern and the game ends with a satisfying finale in which you must make a daring escape.

You can play Arizona Sunshine using both teleport and free movement controls, and I’d recommend the teleport option – not because of motion sickness concerns – but because I found myself frequently getting stuck on rocks and other objects on the ground when using free motion. You can dual wield the various weapons you’ll discover as you progress and there’s a decent selection to choose between – from basic pistols to a single shot grenade launcher.

Reloading is a little strange in the sense that you have to manually eject a clip or magazine and then move the weapon down to your ammo belt. It works – most of the time – but it can be a little fussy. Shooting zombies in VR is certainly fun – especially if you enable the ‘advanced CPU’ option which is really just increased gore and exploding heads.

Overall, the campaign of Arizona Sunshine was pretty fun and something I’ll certainly play again. In fact, I’ll probably pick up the DLC and play through that too, which gives you some idea of how much I enjoyed it. But like I said, this is a relatively low budget experience and it really makes me want to see a VR compatible Left 4 Dead 3 in the future.

In addition to the campaign, Arizona Sunshine also features a fun, if limited, Horde mode in which you can fights waves of ravenous zombies. It’s something I’ll probably play a little, but I imagine it’s more fun in co-op than solo.

I don’t really have any more to say about Arizona Sunshine. It’s a fun, if short, VR game that I’d certainly recommend on sale if you’re a fan of Left 4 Dead or other zombie survival games. If you’ve got a VR set, then it’s worth checking out.

6/10