The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners VR Review

For years, most VR games were just glorified tech demos, rarely offering a true, full-fledged gaming experience. However, that's starting to change, with more games coming out that feel like fully-featured games on par with titles on traditional platforms. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is one such VR game, and while there are certainly some issues with it that keep it from reaching its full potential, it's otherwise a rather impressive and engaging survival-horror virtual reality experience.
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners puts players in the shoes of The Tourist, who is exploring New Orleans, Louisiana in search of the fabled "Reserve" - a treasure trove of important survival supplies. Players are tasked with completing quests for a mysterious man named Casey in exchange for more information on the Reserve, all the while contending with zombies and a militant survivor group known as The Tower.
With New Orleans mostly flooded, players have to use a small boat to travel from one location to the next. While out completing story objectives, players will also feel compelled to collect everything that isn't nailed down, as the gameplay loop in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners revolves around the crafting system. Players gather a bunch of junk, take it back to the bus they live in at their home base, and then toss it in a recycling bin to salvage the crafting materials.

These crafting materials are integral to success in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. Players can use them to create new weapons and healing items, but they can also be used to upgrade the three crafting stations. Upgrading the crafting stations allows for stat upgrades as well, such as increased stamina, health, and other bonuses. Other games would typically separate stat upgrades into a skill tree or something along those lines, but by keeping it all under the crafting umbrella, progression in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is more streamlined and better for it.
Instead of forcing players to hunt down specific crafting recipes like many other games would, The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners instead lets them craft fan favorite weapons right away. Players can create a version of Negan's baseball bat, as well as Rick Grimes' magnum, and they can store extra weapons on their bus for use later. Players will feel compelled to go on extra supply runs just to build up a reliable arsenal. There's a satisfying sense of progression to all this, and it makes the game hard to put down.
The weapons that players collect in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners will mainly be used to kill zombies, which is where VR really enhances the experience. Combat is visceral, intense, and realistic. If players want to swing their barbed-wire baseball bat at a zombie's head, they have to grip the weapon as they would in real life and swing it realistically. This makes fighting zombies a lot more exciting than it would be if players were simply pressing a button for combat.

Melee weapons are definitely preferred in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, though there are plenty of firearms players can use as well. Like with melee weapons, there's a sense of realism when it comes to using guns in Saints and Sinners, with players having to manually eject a clip, put in a new one, and pull back the chamber back before they can shoot. Likewise, shotguns require players to put in each shell individually, and the same goes for a six-shot revolver. Players can easily fumble and drop ammunition on the ground, which can make dangerous situations even more nerve-wracking.
Fighting zombies in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is fun and takes cues from older VR games like Gorn. Fighting human enemies, on the other hand, is a miserable experience. The story will sometimes force players to infiltrate The Tower's hideouts, which are designed in such a way that it makes it seem like the developers wanted players to go through these areas stealthily. However, enemies can spot players instantly, even from behind objects, and there is no time to run to safety. The human enemies are ruthless, with players able to die in just a few shots. Stealth in the game just doesn't work, and so players will have to resort to cheesing these encounters.
The survival mechanics in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners only exacerbate the issues with the human combat. Players are constantly having to manage their stamina, which depletes at an alarming rate. It will only take a few minutes after starting a mission for players to have their stamina bar lowered an excessive amount, and the only way to fix it is by eating, which lowers one's max health. We reached a point in the game where it was nearly impossible to find medicine to restore our max health, so our health bar was stuck at the halfway mark and The Tourist wouldn't stop coughing. This went on for hours, and it was just plain annoying.

Survival games often struggle with finding a proper balance with things like the stamina meter, but the one in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is just too harsh. It wouldn't be so bad if players didn't have to sprint everywhere, but the player character's walking speed is unbearably slow. Some players may also dislike the weapon durability system, which, similarly to the stamina meter, is a bit relentless in the early hours.
The farther players get in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, the less annoying these survival mechanics become, though supplies get scarcer each passing day and zombies start to grow in number. Searching for supplies later in the game can become a bit of a chore, as players will constantly have to stop their search to pull out their weapon and whack some zombies on the head. Even though the combat is generally quite fun, this can become tedious after awhile.
Tedium also sets in thanks to the repetitive level design. Most areas players explore in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners look largely the same. Things are mixed up a bit later on, but generally players will be exploring similar-looking streets, looting similar-looking color-coded houses, and interacting with ugly NPCs that also all mostly look the same as one another.

While many of the human characters are the same, gruff-looking bald men copy and pasted over and over again, the voice acting and writing are strong enough that players will still find themselves interested in the stories of the more important NPCs. There are some interesting side quests to find in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners that hit players with some shocking twists and force them to make tough decisions, which is true to the tone of the source material.
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners has incredible respect for the source material in more ways than just the game's story structure. Not only does The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners' stories feel exactly like something from the comic book series or the AMC show, but there are many other little details that will make hardcore fans of the franchise feel right at home. For example, if players shoot a human enemy and fail to destroy their brain, they will eventually reanimate as a zombie. Players are also able to cut guts out of zombies and rub them on themselves for camouflage, which is a trick used by the characters in the comic and the show to move stealthily through areas.
Being able to do things like cut out a zombie's guts shows just how far the level of interactivity goes in The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. It's reminiscent of the recent Boneworks VR game, with players able to interact with almost anything that isn't nailed down. This is great for VR enthusiasts who have a lot of experience with virtual reality, though admittedly some players may find all the different things they can do a bit intimidating at first. Even so, this is better than bogging everything down with lengthy tutorials.

There is a very brief tutorial at the beginning of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, but otherwise players are left to their own devices and allowed to experiment to figure out how everything works. This is just one of the ways that the game is reminiscent of the Dark Souls series, with the other being its death system. If players die, they are given the option to reload a save or continue and attempt to reclaim their loot. Like in other Souls-like games, if players die again on their way to their loot, it's lost forever. Most levels are small enough that players can just reload the auto-save and not really lose much progress, though, so it doesn't really add anything to the game.
The Souls-like mechanics don't help or hurt The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, but something that does bring the game down is its technical performance. We ran into some rather serious issues, like crashing, stuttering, and times where the game would refuse to register when we were eating food or trying to grab a collectible. These issues were less prevalent than they are in some other VR games, but still enough to cause a headache.
Technical issues aside, The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is generally a good time and one of the better VR horror games on the market. The level of interactivity alone makes it a game that many VR enthusiasts will want to check out, though expect to be frustrated by the poorly-implemented stealth mechanics and human combat encounters.
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is out now for PC-powered VR headsets, with PlayStation VR and Oculus Quest releases coming later this year. Game Rant tested the Steam version using an Oculus Rift S headset.