Now Playing: Saints & Sinners (VR)

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a VR survival game. It shares a similar comic book visual style to the Telltale Walking Dead series. The colours are subdued, the lighting is gloomy and the ambient sound is largely silent. Saints and Sinners doesn’t exactly ‘pop’ visually or audibly, but it does do an effective job of immersing you within this moody, land of the dead.

You play as The Tourist, a survivor who enters the flooded city of New Orleans in order to locate the ‘Reserve’ – a secret bunker full of guns, ammunition, food and medical supplies. But you’re not alone in searching for this hidden cache. There are two other groups of survivors in the city, and neither of them are particularly friendly.

The game has a simple, but effective structure. Each day you will venture to one of several locations around the city. Each location is unique, some set within residential streets, others within commercial / industrial areas of the city. Your goal in each location will vary depending upon what you need – you may have a quest to retrieve a particular item, or you may be in search of specific materials to complete a crafting recipe or upgrade.

 

The locations aren’t massive, but they are highly detailed and each features at least 2 main internal areas to explore, often with multiple entry and exit points. Your time in each location will, at least initially, be limited. The other survivors in the city use a system of bells to manage the herds of walkers roaming the streets. If you’re still in a location when the bells ring, it’s time to run.

So you’re on a clock, but once you’re familiar with each location (and you’ll likely visit each location at least twice during the course of the game) you have more than enough time to search every loot hotspot on the map and return to your cozy, comfy school bus before it gets dark. I know some people won’t like the time limit, but as you progress through the story, there will be days when every location will be free of the timer, giving you all the time you want to explore.

The timer does put pressure on you, particularly in the early game when you’re not well equipped to deal with a zombie horde. You need to scavenge materials and craft items if you’re going to survive. There are three crafting facilities at your home base, one focusing upon food and medicine, another upon guns, and the third upon melee weapons. As you upgrade each crafting bench you’ll unlock new recipes and character abilities – such an increased inventory, greater health or more stamina.

Every day that passes also sees a reduction in the loot you can find, and an increase in the zombies roaming each map. There is obviously a limit to this, otherwise the game would eventually become unplayable, but it’s certainly best to maximise your scavenging early on when supplies are more plentiful – so I’d recommend crafting that backpack upgrade as your first priority.

 

You can progress through Saints and Sinners at your own pace – there’s no time limit on any of the main missions, although a couple of side quests will fail if you don’t complete them before the end of the day, so be careful of those. You can choose to spend your days scavenging and fighting other survivors, or you can focus on the main story quests – or, as most people likely will, you can do a bit of both.

The main quest isn’t particularly substantial and can be completed within a few short hours if you’re intent on just rushing from one mission to the next. And the quests themselves aren’t particularly complex, with the objective of nearly all of them being simply to retrieve an item from a location and return. It might not sound very exciting, but it’s actually a pretty decent main quest, propped up with some very good VA. It’s a shame it’s not more substantial, that we don’t get to spend more time with or better develop the few characters with whom you interact. But it’s still, overall, an engaging and enjoyable quest, one which will vary somewhat depending upon the choices you make.

Once you complete the main quest you can continue to explore the world, looting, fighting and scavenging as you please. But once you’ve unlocked all of the various recipes and upgrades, there’s not really much left to do but see how many more walkers you can kill in various bloody and brutal ways.

Saints and Sinners is a deliciously gory game. Despite the comic book style, it doesn’t shy away from the brutality not only of killing walkers, but other survivors. Thanks to the VR platform, there’s no ‘press X to kill’ style attacks, because every swipe, swing and stab is tracked via your controllers. So you can grab a walker’s head and stab up, down or from the side. You can cut off their arms and leave them rolling about on the floor. You can stick a pistol in their mouth and pull the trigger. You can smash a baseball bat wrapped with barb wire into their crumbling craniums.

 

The game allows for a variety of (sickeningly) creative kills. You can’t cut their legs off, sadly, watching as they crawl slowly towards you, which seems like a strange omission in a zombie game, but overall, the melee combat feels solid. It is physics based, so the weight of each weapon and the strength of your swing / stab is taken into account. It’s not as in-depth as something like Blade & Sorcery, but it’s very enjoyable nonetheless. The guns, compared to the melee weapons, feel a little weak both in feedback and audio.

Overall, Saints and Sinners is the best VR game I’ve played at the time of writing. It’s a fairly lengthy experience if you take your time to explore and upgrade / craft everything. I clocked over 20 hours on my first run and it’s a game I’ll most certainly play again in the future. It does have a few bugs and issues – the most annoying being that the SteamVR chaperone grid won’t display in game – so a few more patches to polish and improve would be most welcome.

It’s also a game I’d like to see a more ambitious sequel to – a continuation of the story of The Tourist. A sequel with a more elaborate story and missions, a greater sense of player choice and more npc interactions. Saints and Sinners, despite its flaws, is a strong foundation to build upon.

7/10