The War Z Review

Somewhere out there in The War Z's zombie-infested Colorado map is food and drink, supplies, and weaponry to help fend off the undead and other players. The challenge, for me, was putting up with its awkward movement controls, the hackers, and the random buggy deaths long enough to find them. The War Z displays astonishing design ineptitude and some of the worst kinds of microtransactions in gaming, all in one ugly package. I'm feeling worn down -- but not tired enough to not be angry.



Starting out, I was deposited with a few supplies, a flashlight that acts as your basic weapon, and no objectives. "Just don't die" is pretty much all that's on offer by way of objectives -- but from the moment I spawned, I was already dying by way of slowly depleting hunger and thirst bars. It sounds brutal, and it should. That's part of the deal you make with the developers and other players in a survival-horror MMO: dying by zombie or player hands is part of the package.

Dead Before My Time

And die a lot I did, both fairly and in staggeringly unfair situations. My demises so far include, but are not limited to, being swiped to death by a zombie in stilted, tedious melee combat (sudden, but expected), being shot by bandit players (not expected, but it's how this world works), walking down a slope and dying even though it wasn't steep (I swore), being shot immediately on spawn by an unseen hacker (I made sure his mother was soundly cursed and the developers hexed for allowing it), being resurrected amidst inescapable zombies and dying before my character model was fully loaded (I quit for an hour and went for a walk to calm down), and being tracked by a hacker and shot (keyboard smashing, mouse-breaking apoplexy). By my count, there are more opportunites to die unfairly than fairly.


Dying unfairly really sucks, because death is a big thing in The War Z. It means you lose everything you're carrying, which is a huge penalty in this strangled world. In-game items are tough to get to, and are often surrounded by bludgeon-resistant zombies. Getting in and getting out of any building required slowing my already slow character to a crawl and hoping whatever was inside was worth potentially angering the strolling, groaning monstrosities. It's easy to exploit -- I've seen players exploit the system by logging out when they've found loot and then back in on another server to appear in the same place in hopes of finding the same loot there. But there's also a bigger problem here.

The Scene of the Crime

It's the Marketplace. The War Z is a paid-for game with a real-cash marketplace for items. Anything from ammo, meds, armor, even melee weaponry, can be bought. There's some element of balance, in that you can only access these items in specific parts of the map, but it's still an insidious act nonetheless. Particularly because there's no distinction between items you've found and those that are paid for when it comes to being murdered for them. Any game that asks me to spend money on things I can lose must have air-tight security, yet I quickly lost a baseball bat that I'd paid for with real money to a hacker. I was ripped off, plain and simple, and The War Z was an accessory to the crime. I will give the developers credit for at least allowing all the marketplace items to be scavengeable. That's strangely generous, considering its policies elsewhere.


The worst, though, is that despite having removed its beta label and being sold as a released game, The War Z is pretty clearly not ready for prime time. It's telling that the one screen where all the buttons do what they claim to do is in the Marketplace. The War Z's UI is littered with buttons that don't do anything, or that pop-up with a "coming soon" note, as if a promise is enough to placate the gamers that bought it. Not the character creation, where you can't select the skill tree; not the missing friends list (some of the most basic of MMO social functionality), not the server browser, where attempting to create your own server doesn't work; not in-game, where the zoom buttons on the difficult-to-read map don't work. Whatever the term "Foundation Release" is supposed to mean, it's not a descriptive term gamers understand as "a game that is not yet feature-complete." The term for that is "alpha." ("Beta" describes a game that has all its features, and is in bug-fixing and polishing before release.)

Alpha Dog

Alpha would have told me I was about to play a game that has a profanity filter in chat, but not when you name characters. I was called an "***" by a player with an unobscured name so creatively vile that I was genuinely impressed. An alpha label would have given me the heads up that the enemy's AI pathfinding is a joke, and that when I was standing on a stack of pallets moving an inch would send the attacking zombies running to the opposite side of a fence to get "nearer." Alpha might even explain that zombies can't get to you on elevated surfaces, even if they're in reach, or that deep water currently acts as an invisible wall. Though even that wouldn't have explained away with the terrible textures and laughable animations.


It would also explain the radical fluctuations in how things work with patches. When I started playing on December 17th, dying meant the character couldn't be resurrected for an hour. That's a harsh death penalty, but ok, fine, this is a harsh world. Then on the 18th, a patch was released: revival now takes four hours, or you can pay to have the character spawn back early. What an awful, money-grubbing thing to do to people who've already bought a game.

Faint Praise

Is there anything worth praising, here? I like the global inventory, which lets you take items and pass them between characters. There are some nice atmospherics as well, with the music swelling at the right moment, and the background noise of woodpeckers, birds, insects and snapping twigs giving a nice ambiance. The situation you're placed in is tense, and there's something to be said for watching the trees part and seeing the dead, wrecked city of Denver ahead of you -- even if it feels tiny. The view distance is also pretty far, so you can make useful decisions based on the flickering torchlight of potential friends/enemies.


But that's not good enough. Not nearly good enough. The situation is dire enough that if you bought The War Z on Steam during the two days it was available before Valve came it its senses, apologized, and pulled it, the place to get your full War Z refund is here.

Meanwhile, Hammerpoint continues to sell its monstrosity on its own site without much mention at all of the alpha status. I can't find it on the front page, in the FAQ, or on the store. All I can say is that The War Z is a bad game that deserves all the controversy it's drawn, and that you should avoid it like the undead.