Sniper Elite was never really the most obvious option for a zombie spin-off. I mean, generally speaking if a zombie is far enough away for you to be sniping them, you’ve got a good 30 minutes of shambling before they’re a threat to you anyway. Not to mention that you don’t want to spend time watching the gory, bone-crunching details of your precisely placed sniper round making its way through a zombie skull when there’s the rest of the horde still to go, and they’re getting closer. On the other hand, I do love shooting zombies. Also, I quite like VR, so Zombie Army VR should be right up my alley.
Zombie Army VR is so self explanatory it almost defies description. There’s a Nazi zombie apocalypse at the end of World War 2, and so you’ve got to use World War 2 weapons to blast them. Sure there’s technically a story going on in the background, but you’re probably not paying it much attention – in previous games this was because it’s just a thin excuse to shoot zombies, but now it’s also because you’re in VR and you’re poking the poor officer in charge of you in the eyeball with the barrel of your sniper rifle whilst he’s giving his briefing.
At any given moment, you have a sniper rifle, a secondary weapon, usually an automatic like a Thompson, and a pistol. You’ll unlock new options as you find them in game and they can be upgraded with packs that you find in levels as well. You also have three consumable slots which you can use to carry items like healing kits (which are injectors here), grenades, mines, and other kinds of traps. Using these you’re going to fight through a horde of zombies in a style that is, despite being set in World War 2 times, almost identical to every other zombie shooter you’ve played in VR. With that said, you will already know if this style of game is still interesting to you, or if you think it’s all been done to (un)death by now.
It’s not bad if you’re into this kind of thing and just like killing zombies, but Zombie Army VR’s most remarkable quality is how unremarkable it actually is. The only unique feature is the X-ray killcam that has been adapted from the flatscreen games. Something has been lost in translation though, as bullets often just clip through skulls without leaving a hole behind, or a hole just appears in a different part of the skull. Without that feature to differentiate this from other VR zombie games, it’s just a bog standard game where voices chunner at you for a minute before you go out and kill more zombies.
The shooting works just fine, reloading works fine too, using the ammo belt-eject mag-pull slide method you’ve used a thousand times before. Occasionally, doors will be blocked by shadowy stuff until you kill all the zombies in the room in a slightly cheap way of trying to put on pressure on you as zombies just spawn into the room. I’ve never liked this mechanic; it’s much better tackling an enemy when they’re in a particular place and you can plan an approach, and it’s far less interesting to just have them appearing around you like a shooting gallery.
It even has the typical big moments you’d expect from a zombie shooter, like the moment where you temporarily get a massive machine gun turret to mow down a large amount of enemies. It’s just all the same stuff. Again, it’s not bad by any stretch, it’s just not particularly inspired. If this game was released a few years ago before the cascade of other zombie shooters, it would probably be considered very good, but with other games like Arizona Sunshine 2 and After the Fall, Zombie Army just feels a little too…obvious. At least you can play it in co-op, which should help breathe some life into it a bit, but again, both of the aforementioned VR zombie games also feature co-op and are more interesting to play.
