Arizona Sunshine 2 Meta Quest 2 Review 6/10 🐕 @pixelhunted #IndieGame #GameDev #VRGames

The VR dream isn’t dead, but it’s starting to look a bit wonky. The Metaverse is a joke, PSVR2 is dying on the vine and, almost four years after the release of Half-Life: Alyx, there hasn’t been a title that comes close to its production values and ingenuity.

Enter Arizona Sunshine 2. The first game released in 2016 across multiple VR platforms and, while an utterly boilerplate zombie shooter, at least delivered on its promise of letting you mow down hordes of the undead with a variety of high-powered weaponry. 

We’re now eight years on and the sequel has finally arrived. So, what’s changed?

On a surface level very little. The sequel continues the dusty, sun-baked ambience of the original, taking you through a series of generic video-gamey environments as you blast apart ever larger gangs of zombies. Perhaps it’s a teeny bit unfair to criticize a game set in the real world for being overly familiar, but it’s difficult not to feel a weariness as you descend into the inevitable sewer level.

But things have moved on in the world of VR shooting since 2016. These days the name of the game is reloading and, to quote a true video game icon: “there's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long silver bullet into a well-greased chamber."

Arizona Sunshine 2 doesn’t quite offer that level of supreme satisfaction, but reloading each weapon means ejecting the spent magazine, grabbing a fresh one from your ammo belt, slapping it into place and racking the gun. At first, you’re clumsy, wibbling around each firearm as the zombies trundle ever closer. There’s something very human about grabbing your last clip, fumbling it, dropping it on the floor, then frantically reaching down to grab it as hungry arms stretch towards you.

But by the time you’re mid-way through the game you’ve turned into John Wick and I was often able to juggle (sometimes literally) two weapons as I simultaneously blasted and reloaded.

It’s great stuff. That said, Half-Life: Alyx and the excellent Resident Evil 4 VR (and many other VR shooters) also feature these exact reloading mechanics, so this isn’t particularly ground-breaking.

Less inspiringly there’s also a dog buddy named “Buddy”. Dogs and VR are a great combo, if only because petting a dog in VR with motion controls never stops being fun (one of the few highlights of Blair Witch VR).

Buddy can be ordered to take down zombies, retrieve objects, strip armour away from foes, and solve some puzzles so straightforward they barely warrant the word. For example, there’s a body blocking a gate. You direct Buddy towards it, he shimmies under a fence, drags the body away and you proceed. Not exactly a brainteaser. Buddy is also invincible and often vibrates through doors, a sight that somewhat detracts from his canine believability.

The actual gameplay is precisely what you’d expect from a zombie shooter and, for the most part, enemies are more environmental hazards than opponents. Things are intermittently shaken up when you’re presented with hundreds of them zeroing in on you, forcing you to consider funnelling them through the environment, prioritizing targets, and using your supplemental grenades and Molotov cocktails and so on.

The game is about ten hours long and this gameplay loop doesn’t get old, though the lack of any decent story means it comes very close. The broad concept is that you’re searching for “Patient Zero” who may be able to end the zombie apocalypse. The problem is you’re playing as one of the most annoying first-person protagonists in a hot minute.

The aim seems to be to show us a cynical hero ground down by isolation and trauma. The end result is that you’re playing as a bit of a prick. There’s an unfortunate glimmer of Duke Nukem in the fart jokes and beery machismo that extends not just from the character but into the environment, which has 00s-era GTA dick gags sprinkled throughout it. Perhaps leaning into the absurdity of the situation is the smart way to go, but there’s nothing worse than a game that’s trying to be funny but isn’t.

Another criticism - though more forgivable - is that for me this was an extremely ugly game. Though promoted with its shiny PSVR2 and Meta Quest 3 versions I played on the Quest 2, which is functional but unattractive. Enemies don’t have shadows, lighting is flat, and texture quality is uniformly low. Simply being in VR mitigates a lot of that, though I’ve watched footage captured from more recent tech and the Quest 2 version is graphically cut back to the bone as far as it could go.

Again, that’s understandable, but it still costs a whopping £43.99 on Quest 2 and you’re getting an inarguably inferior product. But hey, perhaps a game like this on aging hardware is impressive in its own right.

SUMMARY

Arizona Sunshine 2 neither excels nor does anything particularly poorly. If you want a competently made VR shooter in which you blast away at the undead with various firearms it’ll deliver the goods (though Resident Evil 4 VR still has it beat). 

It’s sad that a mediocre game like this is one of the bigger VR releases of recent months, to say nothing of the fact we’re almost a half-decade on from Half-Life: Alyx and the genre has failed to evolve in any meaningful way.

Maybe the future of gaming is still through a VR headset, but if there’s not a quantum leap in design soon the already dwindling novelty of full immersion is going to dry up altogether.