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Talk about context. The War Z is a forgettable experience, easy enough to dismiss with a few nasty words and the faintest of praise. But it is impossible to ignore the game's damned developers, who since its release have revealed themselves to be either incompetent buffoons or crooked shysters. The amazing details make it impossible to review this in a bubble - not least because The War Z clearly wasn't made in one.Most zombie fans will be aware of the Arma 2 mod DayZ, currently being worked up into a full release by its developer, which layers stealth and survival horror quite brilliantly atop the mechanics of a serious battle simulator. Most of DayZ's ideas are found in The War Z, to the extent that 'brazen' doesn't really do this justice. It's a crappy rip-off. So The War Z has terrible developers and is totally unoriginal, but it does have one surprise: it's sometimes almost fun.
Maybe I'm just a sucker for hopeless cases, because there's no doubt that The War Z is a barrel-scraping production. The idea is an open-world zombie massively multiplayer game on a map of Colorado, where up to 100 players move around the various towns and encampments snaffling supplies and weapons. The reality is a game that wouldn't have been cutting-edge on PlayStation 2. Its rudimentary architecture is almost comical; the buildings are crude cuboids, either solid or hollow, jammed together in little lines. Outside of the buildings things get even worse, with perhaps the defining image being your character's ridiculous three-frame melee attack. You want to know about the audio? The last game I played with worse sound effects was Two Worlds - and you can quote me on that.
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