FREDDY FOR THE BIG TIME

I revisit Arizona Sunshine every so often because it’s a great game; it can be enjoyed solo or co-op in ten-minute chunks or as a more satisfying long-form session, and the core conceit of gunning zombies down is still really satisfying. Honestly, there have been so many shooters released in VR since AS, and nearly none of them have nailed the satisfying and substantial feel offered by Arizona Sunshine, still. However, it was never a very good-looking or slick affair and was full of less and less forgivable jank. I was relieved when Arizona Sunshine 2 came along and smoothed out a lot of those rough edges, whilst largely doubling down on everything that made the first game so good to play.

A remake of the original using later tech is a rather great idea, and I’m largely happy to report that Arizona Sunshine Remake does what it promises to. It includes all the DLC for the original release, similarly remastered, and offers tremendous value for money – there’s even a nifty discount if you’ve got the original in your Quest library already. So, before I get into the specifics, just know that if you’ve played and love the original and are looking for a shiny new version to show off your Quest 3 or 3S, then go to it, I recommend it. You won’t be disappointed. But wait – hey – I haven’t fini… Ah sod you. In your impatience to go spend your money you’re missing out on some exemplary videogame criticism and penmanship. Your loss. The rest of you still with me? Ok, let’s get into it.

FRED DEAD REDEMPTION

Players both familiar and new to Arizona Sunshine will find a lot to love. The setting still feels fresh and original, despite the zombie theme having been done to death, resurrected and headshotted more times than can be counted in the past thirty years. Even Resident Evil, whose fault it all is, has been trying to move away from zombies for at least 15 years. However, zombies do provide a gloriously guilt-free way for us all to virtually live out our fantasies of taking our frustrations and loneliness out on the general public with gardening equipment and automatic weaponry.

Arizona Sunshine Remake casts the player as an unnamed, initially slightly dislikable dude who’s been surviving alone in the Arizona wilderness in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. He’s trying to find any living souls to team up with and has been alone for quite a while when the player quantum leaps into his head. He sounds a bit like a bassist, a roadie or a general stoner – in fact, it occurred to me as I played through the remake that my mental image of him is that he’s Neil Fak from The Bear dropped into a zombie survival scenario. This is a Good Thing. His journey in the course of the game is slight, but brilliant and engaging, and as I mentioned in my original review Sky Soleil’s fantastic performance is key to making the whole thing work. A majority of protagonist voiceovers in VR can be grating or off key, making it a chore to literally inhabit their heads as you progress, but here you are completely engrossed in getting the guy where he wants to go and keeping him alive. If you’ve only ever experienced him in Arizona Sunshine 2, then it’ll be an extra frisson to experience him getting to the point where he’s obsessed with keeping his dog alive when the sequel hits the fan. There’s no massive story here, so the narrative sells itself through empathy with its only character, and this has stood the test of time well.

DEAD MAN, FRED MAN

The game offers pretty cool options for customising the feel of the game – from movement and turning to switching between the simple reloading of the original, or the new VR standard of sliding in a clip and cocking the gun. Thankfully you can now hold pistols with two hands. You can calibrate where you’d like your holsters and ammo to sit on your body. All good, as is the improved Half-Life Alyx style wrist inventory and inclusion of tremendously fun bludgeoning melee weapons like crowbars, picks and hammers. These can be balanced on railings or the sides of tables or shelves while you reload or scavenge, and this feels really cool.

FREDDING THE NEEDLE

The level of challenge is pretty good – on the easier difficulties if you’re a reasonable, quick enough shot you’ll be ok. The game has two paces; scavenging for ammo and exploring, popping heads as you go, and then set piece horde rushes where you hope that you’ve stockpiled enough bullets and picked the right weapons to survive. Like the sequel, these horde rushes can be suffocatingly frustrating and stressful chokeholds on progress or exhilarating and rewarding tests of endurance which provide a tremendous rush of relief and accomplishment when you’re through. If this is your first rodeo, I’d advise playing through on lower difficulties first, so you know roughly what to expect, and then have another playthrough where you’ll have to be a lot more sparing with your ammo and inventive with the offered weapons at your disposal. You won’t have to worry about finding crafting ingredients like in the sequel, but supplies get pretty scarce even if you aren’t the sort of person who likes to spray and pray.

This all changes again when playing through in co-op with a friend, which is such a good feature of both the original game and its shiny new incarnation, Arizona Sunshine Remake. Sadly, the same limitations apply, and this is one thing I really hoped would be improved with the new gameplay. There are points where you’d think one player could be running around gung-ho with an automatic amongst the horde whilst the other takes overwatch, but this is often not so. When a player triggers the horde, the co-op partner will be teleported to their side if they’re in a place the game doesn’t want you to be. Sometimes invisible walls will prevent the player from taking a visible path, the game locking off areas of the map that should be accessible just because the designers wanted it that way. It’s pretty lazy and annoying, and it was weak eight years ago. It’s downright unforgivable for such a classy game to be so graceless in its execution, reiterating its mistakes verbatim after eight years of iteration.

LONG AND WASTED YEARS

Whilst we’re on the subject of things that really should have died and stayed dead with the original game, let’s talk about graphics. By and large the graphics in Arizona Sunshine Remake are a remarkable improvement on the original, as one might expect. The bacon wood textures of the original are long gone, thank goodness, but there are still some items of text that are unforgivably pixelated and horrible. The searchable trunks of the police cars, for example, just about say ‘HIGHWAY PATROL’ on them, but I’ve seen better image quality on those Captcha things online when they’re trying to ascertain I’m human. Most egregious of all is the sniper scope section, where distant zombies are rendered with such horrible quality that the graphics don’t match the original release. In fact, in this one instance they don’t even look as good as the original PlayStation. Vertigo Games have done so much to fly the flag for VR as a gaming medium, and all eyes are on this remake to show us all how it’s done. We let some things slide about the original because of the ambition and overall quality of the experience. Don’t let Ed Wood get hold of your Director’s Cut version, because we’re going to mark it down accordingly now.

The same goes for how fiddly things can be. Scavenging is better and drawers and doors have a far more physical interactivity to them, but sometimes picking up stuff can be unnecessarily finicky and sometimes even bugs out. If you’re carrying things when the game loads a new area, these can sometimes disappear.

This is all stuff that absolutely should have been sorted out. Some of it is patchable, some of it ain’t. Let’s see what the next couple of months may bring – but this is a remake of an eight-year-old game, and it should have been slicker. It only takes seven years to train as a doctor or an architect, so I think it’s reasonable to expect Fred to have got his shit together a bit better than this, dead or no.

SUNSHINE DESSERTS

Arizona Sunshine Remake does exactly what it promises to do, and provides great value, great fun and great challenge in one juicily headshottable package. It drips with atmosphere, from the setting and impressive voice acting to the perfectly judged musical score. It still provides the most satisfying gunplay on the Quest and sidesteps the time commitment problem of Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners by being playable in bitesize chunks, and in co-op too. You get the excellent DLC stories as part of the deal, and there’s also the endlessly replayable Horde mode to play with up to 4 friends. It supercedes the original game entirely and provides fans of the original and the sequel plenty of reasons to dive back in, whilst being a very enticing and recommended prospect for new players.

However, be warned that this is a remaster rather than a true remake, and the failings of the original game are often brought along wholesale for the ride.

Are you still there? Or was “Rogue-like” all you needed to hear to make up your mind? “Judge not,” the book says, “lest ye be judged!” But who are we kidding? This is a review, and if anything, we’re here to judge.

[Quick Note: We’re holding a giveaway competition and have 5 Hellsweeper VR keys to give away, to enter, visit our video review on YouTube and read the instructions in the description!]

We know a lot of VR gamers are sick of Rogue-likes, even though some of the best games in VR fall under that genre: In Death: Unchained, Synapse, and The Light Brigade, just to mention a few. The main gripe seems to be that some gamers feel Rogue-likes are an excuse to recycle environments and assets, artificially elongating the longevity of a game without actually providing much in return, that they are, in a sense, lazy.

Well, let me reassure you, Hellsweeper VR, coming to you from Mixed Realms, who previously gave us the action-packed Sairento VR: Untethered, is anything but lazy. There are some things Mixed Realms does really well: giving you lots of ways to murder, maim, and destroy your enemies, offering gut-wrenching VR traversal that’s not for the faint of heart, and putting VR in their game titles even when there are no pancake versions of those games.

“Enough already,” I can hear you say, “tell us about the damn game!”

Ultra Violence

Dispensing with needless narrative, your guide is a flying insect, happy to plunge into your ears if you refuse to place it there yourself. Hellsweeper, well-suited for an impatient crowd, doesn’t oblige you to learn all its mechanics straight away. It gives you a rudimentary tutorial and then lets you get down and dirty, plunging you into the hellscapes that form the backdrop of its action.

The is a game that likes to mix it up. You have a pistol, a sword, fire magic, force powers, frost magic, and laser magic. You can double jump and float in the air like Neo while twisting around, reloading your guns, and unleashing your might on the wide range of monsters and demons bent on your destruction. Hell, you even have a hellhound; we’ll call him Dexter, because… why not?

Good puppy.

The game gives you 18 levels, divided into three acts, with a boss at the end of each act. There’s some variety in the level missions, but they are mostly predictable for the genre: survive the clock, defeat a certain number of baddies, destroy the baddie-generating totems, find the McGuffins before the timer runs out, etc. You’ll find chests that you can unlock for extra perks, blessings, or gold, and you’re awarded powers or enhancements to choose between at the end of every level.

System Shock

Where Hellsweeper VR really excels, and I cannot stress this enough, is in the systems-based approach to game mechanics. Like something out of a Nintendo flagship, you can come up with all kinds of crazy combinations and things to try out. Got a pistol and a fireball power? Slam the fireball into the pistol to get scorching fire-boosted bullets. Hell, summon fireballs in each hand, slam them together, and create a fire vortex around you. Dropped your gun? Pick it up with your telekinesis and shoot it while you hold it meters away from you. Basically, if you can think of something that might be cool to try, chances are, it’ll work. Hell, you can even fire-charge your hellhound, making his attacks even more devastating while the flames last.

Hellsweeper VR provides unparalleled freedom when it comes to the different ways you can go about your killing spree. You can somersault, and you can do wall runs. I have no idea what else you can do, because it takes a long, long time to unlock absolutely everything, and I’m not quite there yet, but I’m glad the game got delayed because clearly, the extra development time has been well spent.

50 Shades of Red

Graphically, the PCVR version is clearly superior to the Quest 2 release, but that’s hardly a surprise. The fact is, the game looks good on PCVR and decent by standalone standards on Quest. The environments are rich, although some of the textures can be a bit muddy on Quest. The weapon designs are good, and the magic effects are much fancier on PC than on Quest, but overall, it showcases good level design, great enemy design, decent bosses, and excellent art direction. The only real complaint is that the hell theme kind of corners the color palette, making me wish for some interludes or even flashback levels in other, less hellish, less RED environments.

Snikt

The game does a good job with sound. Like underappreciated bass in rock music, you tend not to notice the sound in games as long as it’s good, and there’s nothing here that feels off or weak. Spatial audio helps you locate enemies, the sounds of your weapons are satisfying without being overbearing, and different enemies have different sound signatures. All good.

Mumble Mumble

So what’s not to like?

Well, as mentioned before, some people just don’t like Rogue-likes, and for them, this game never really stood a chance. Although the sheer joy of its mechanics and the freedom of its movement and combat should appeal to all but the most cynical of VR gamers. That said, the sheer intensity of its movement and combat might render it unplayable for those new to VR movement. It does have a teleport option, but using it would be like clipping its wings. The only other caveat, albeit one some might consider a bonus, is that it’ll take you a long, long time to unlock all that it has to offer. If you want to unlock everything, be prepared to grind your way through runs.

I also don’t like the fact that I can’t blow up explosive barrels by shooting at them, not even with glowing hot, fire-infused bullets. Nothing seems to work, except grabbing them with telekinesis and slamming them at something. Mixed Realms, if you’re watching this, let me shoot the damn barrels!

Another gripe, as the game currently stands at launch, is that the co-op multiplayer only allows for one act, through four or five levels, followed by one boss battle. Sure, it’s randomized, so you’re not always playing the same act every time, but you cannot team up with a friend and complete a whole run through the 18 levels and three bosses. Pete and I found this out the hard way. Sad faces ensued.

Hellbound

Hellsweeper VR is a no-holds bar VR action game, made by developers who relish quick traversal, mad weapon combos, ambidextrous warriors, and relentless combat. It’s easy to recommend for gamers with solid VR legs, and a thirst for adrenaline, and if you’ve been anticipating it since it was first announced, are familiar with Sairento, and who knew what kind of game to expect, I can assure you that, yes – this is indeed the droid you’re looking for.