World War Z E3 2018 Preview
Do you remember Left 4 Dead? Sure you do. All those zombies rushing you in the dark, teammates forced to work together, conserving ammunition, fighting off special monstrosities. Yes, it was great. But what if there were way more zombies and better guns? What if you could lay down traps and defenses? What if there were actual missions to complete and some hope of survival? Well, then you’d have World War Z.
Saber Interactive is working to reproduce the terrifying swarms from the 2013 film, using tech I barely understand to ensure that no two swarms behave exactly the same. The zombies climb over one another to form ladders, ramps and roads, making short work of barbed wire and other traps. No matter what weapon you level at them, they’ll work to overcome it with sheer numbers. Thankfully you have a lot of weapons to level at them.
Weapons are divided into primary, secondary and heavy. The first two categories can be replenished easily, while the heavy weapons will vanish once they’re used up. Thankfully, they’re mostly pretty awesome as compensation. I have especially good memories of the repeating shotgun. All power of the shotgun with none of the usual time needed to reload. In fact, all of the weapons feel pretty good to use. Aiming is a smooth, simple process that let me burst undead skulls with relative ease. Bullets and bombs also come with an impact that feels just right for explosive zombie annihilation.
The team present at the demo assured me that no two runs through a given stage will play out quite the same. Indeed, even the special defenses you can acquire will change depending on how you’ve fared in the stage up to this point. Because I was playing with three members of the dev team, we were gifted with barbed wire. Apparently if you’re getting kicked around any worse than that, you can end up with a high-powered turret instead.
I’m looking forward to seeing how World War Z turns out, though I am a bit worried about the difficulty level. One of the challenges in playing with the devs is that you don’t get a clear idea of how tough things will get. Zombie games are one genre where I want the challenge level to be as high as possible. If I’m going to survive an onslaught of swarming undead, I want to earn that victory.
