Arizona Sunshine is one of the best zombie VR games released to date with a solid campaign filled with great voice acting and exciting shooting, as well as an addictive horde mode featuring waves of the deadly undead.
Over a year after its release its getting a piece of story-based DLC soon called Dead Man, which is a prequel to the base game’s original campaign. At GDC last month we got the chance to go hands-on with this DLC and tried it out using the Vive tracker enabled PP Gun VR controller.
The developer that showed me the demo explained that the entire DLC mission will likely last around two hours in length, which is about half the length of the original game’s campaign. All together that bumps up Arizona Sunshine’s entire story to around six hours, which is comparable to the campaign mode in most Call of Duty or Battlefield games, for example.
My mission was pretty straight forward in the demo as I had to turn on an elevator shaft and go down underground to explore some mines. Along the way I ran into a lot of zombies and had a couple moments where I nearly got overrun.
The first time I played Arizona Sunshine was with the Oculus Touch controllers and since then it’s came to PSVR, including support for the PS Aim controller. Now playing with the even more feature-rich PP Gun, it’s clear that Vertigo Games’ breakout hit is just as much a function of your control method as it is the game’s content as a whole.
Playing with the PS Aim controller offered some great thrills and it felt really visceral to be in the moment, aiming down the sights, and manipulating a rifle with both hands, but the lack of 360-degree tracking meant it was difficult to really establish a sense of presence in a fast-paced shooter like Arizona Sunshine. The PP Gun fixes all of that.
Since it’s a Vive device I could freely spin and look around at all sides, holding the gun up to take out zombies, and even sidestepping and walking freely around the room.
The actual narrative itself in this story-based DLC takes a backseat to smart level design and action. I spent a lot of time cracking open doors, peaking around corners, and getting headshots on zombies before they ever got a chance to get close to me.
For fans of Arizona Sunshine the Dead Man DLC seems like a good thing: more of the same. It doesn’t do anything too dramatic with the formula, but provides some new levels and new hordes of zombies to shoot down. Ideally it really should have released much closer to the game’s original release, but since the team was busy porting it to PSVR and releasing Skyworld, that likely mucked up the schedule.
Dead Man will arrive this Spring for Rift, Vive, and PSVR for the low price of just $2.49. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
