The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Video Game Review

I've been needing some new stuff from The Walking Dead for a while. While waiting for the final season of the main show to air in August I've had to deal with the news that the now terrible (but used to be fantastic) Fear the Walking Dead is getting dumber and dumber with each season. That show keeps killing off its big villains like flies and it's so frustrating to hear about! I've been working on my rewrite of the show (starting with season 4 where the quality began to dive), but I've hit a writer's block. But then I remembered there is another Walking Dead property I haven't experienced yet and which I've been wanting to explore for along while: The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners.

Saints and Sinners is a virtual reality game set in The Walking Dead universe where you, the player, is a tourist in New Orleans who gets wrapped up in a conflict between two factions: The Tower, a community that stands for law and order, and the Reclaimed, a community that believes the Tower are tyrants and who wish to be more free from their rule. In the middle of this though is a mystery cache of supplies called "The Reserve." Soon after you land yourself in New Orleans you discovers some clues to the location of The Reserve from a guy named Casey. You go on a quest then to uncovered this massive amount of supplies, but is the Reserve worth finding? And if it's found will it only bring more death to washed up city?

Ever since getting my new graphics card and playing Half Life Alyx I've been eager to play more virtual reality games. They are a fantastic new way to play games for me and I helps me be active. A few weeks ago (before the Steam Summer Sales began this year) I remembered that this game existed and immediately bought it at full price. Could I have waited a few weeks when it was 25% off? Yes. Do I regret not waiting? No. Because The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is a fantastic game! I'm not just saying that as an avid fan of zombies and The Walking Dead, but also because there are elements in the game that really push VR tech. I intend to keep playing this game, even after total completion, because it is so fun, so invigorating with what it brings to the VR table, that I'm totally hooked.

Let's start with the VR integration. Honestly this has some incredible VR gameplay to it. From holding guns with kickback and no laser sights or scopes to having to literally wrap bandages around your arm to heal yourself, I felt so involved with the zombie apocalypse! It's a fantastic example of what VR can accomplish and how it can pull players into a game's world. There was a ton of effort put into the gameplay of Saints and Sinners because I felt so exhilarated playing the game. I never felt more like I was in a zombie apocalypse than in this game. Often I would to myself as I walked the flooded streets of New Orleans, "Man... I'm actually surviving..."

Saying this though, I did have a few issues with the VR controls in the game. Firstly, the side holsters for your guns and/or knives was often being grabbed when I tried to run or I tried to grab something off the ground. When I changed the grip settings so I didn't have to continually hold the controller constantly this did lessen, but it was a continual problem. I would have liked it if I could adjust the height of my sidearms to be higher or lower on my body. Also reloading guns could be a little challenging at times in that with the lever-action rifles and shotguns. While you hold them with one hand and the other hand pulls the level or loads a shell into the magazine the gun would sometimes move about weirdly so sometimes it took a little extra effort to reload.

There are multiple elements you have to track while scavenging New Orleans. First is your health and stamina. Health is obvious, while stamina is how much you can run and swing your melee weapons. You cannot swing your spiked bat, katana, or your knives endlessly and if you use up all your stamina (which can happen easily if you're not careful) you can become helpless to grabbing walkers, as well as unable to run from them. You have to be able quickly to switch between melee and ranged weapons in jiffy, especially when walkers you encounter later on can have diseases, which can chop away at your maximum health if kill them with melee or if they grab you. You can eat food that you find throughout each level to restore stamina, but most of them take away some of your maximum health as a downside. There was much fewer items to heal your health, which I feel is a gameplay problem that could have been fixed.

Another gameplay element you have to keep track of while out and about is the wear of your weapons. Nothing last forever and killing walkers or people enough time with any of your weapons degrades them. If you aren't careful and prepared you might break a very important tool and be weaponless against the undead and living. This happened to me a few times while playing and I had to run as fast as I could to the boat home, using broken bottles and junk around me to fend off any attacking walkers. Those situations were some of the scariest out there because having nothing on your to protect yourself with all those monsters out there is... it's frickin' scary guys!

As the game progresses more walkers begin to appear each day and the amount the scavengable supplies lessens. That's why you got to make sure every trip out into New Orleans results in a backpack full of goodies. Everything you collect can be recycled into resources used to craft gear or unlock new recipes. Some of the gear is permanent upgrades while others are sick new weapons and restorative items. I eventually ended up with duel army knives, a katana, an automatic rifle, a shit ton of ammo, and a lot of cooked food and medicine in my pack.

A really delicious icing on this wonderful cake is the sound integration. If you have a microphone plugged in while playing you can set it so that it picks up what you say. Anything you say into the microphone can be picked up by walkers and humans. That is amazing! I sadly didn't give it a try until late in the game and I'm very sad I missed out on trying this during the main story. This is a fantastic feature for a zombie game and it pulls you into the world even more! If you get frustrated and start swearing the walkers will go, "Hey Bob, did you hear that noise? Let's go check it out," and you could get swarmed without knowing your shouting brought a horde down on you. What a fantastic feature to a survival game!

All of this makes Saints and Sinners a fantastic zombie survival game when it comes to gameplay! The game was made by Skybound, who are the publishers of The Walking Dead comics, so they knew exactly what they needed to do to make the player feel like a survivor in the zombie apocalypse. To find everything in the game and unlock everything you had to really look about and scrounge about for supplies and new recipes, which is fantastic. Even with my epic gear I never felt fully safe because the dead and living could come out of nowhere and give me a hard time. Things did get easier as I found better gear, but never was I overconfident in my abilities. Multiple times I slaughtered a bunch of people and/or walkers with easy, but others times I was defeated harshly and had to run back out to reclaim my backpack of supplies. Maybe it's because a very dedicated fan of the zombie genre, but once the dead rise up life is never easy.

Even if I did feel untouchable I was always uncomfortable with the tone and atmosphere of New Orleans, it was always creepy and broken... a land of scavengers and monsters. There were so many dark areas and all I had was a shake-able flashlight to light up those places. Not just that, but almost every day I went out I was on a timer. If I wasn't back on the boat to home base after a certain period the bells from a nearby church would go off. And where there is noise there are walkers. A huge horde would come in and that is the time to scream and panic and run for your fucking life! Thankfully I almost always was ahead of the timer, so I barely experience the danger of a horde of walkers. But that's not to say I haven't had to tangle with a lot of them at once.

Now there is a major problem in this game for me and it's that Saints and Sinners has mostly main story missions. There are barely any side quests for the player to do and most that exist are only there to assist in the main story. For an open world survival game where you, the character and player, have to do some questionably moral things to survive this lack of side missions is disappointing. There were so few of them in fact it might have been better to not have side missions in the game. The only side mission I can remember being a side mission was a gay couple wanting to be together and me, the player, delivering letters between them. That's it.

Another problem of the game is how it is advertised on its Steam page. There is a quote that goes: "See how your choices affect the people of New Orleans, and learn to live with the consequences." Sadly, that is a lie. Your choices in this game barely affect the people of New Orleans. Watching gameplay I've seen players murder anybody and sometimes everyone they meet without a care in the world in little to no consequences. You can kill major characters in the game with no problem and receive mission items early on by doing so with no downsides other than that voice in the back of your head saying, "WHAT THE HELL MAN?!!" For those players though that kill without consideration of their actions though that voice will be completely ignored.

I was not expecting there to be a karma system as in-depth as the stuff from Telltale's The Walking Dead games, that would be crazy. But there needed to be some sort of system in which mindlessly killing people had an effect on the world. Perhaps people would become more hostile faster if you kill a lot of innocent scavengers. This could also affect the main two factions when you kill one or the other or both too much. In any Walking Dead media though there was consequences to murdering people, innocent or otherwise. Telltale was very correct in reminding their players that characters would remember your actions. And it needed to be the same for this game as well.

There was only one time in the game where my choice actually had a big effect on the plot. It was at the very end. After a sudden encounter with the leader of the Reclaimed, where he gives me the final item I need for the Reserve and tells me to flood the building instead of opening it to people of New Orleans, I also encounter the main leader of the Tower. I'm given a choice: Kill one of them and the other side will not attack me in the final mission. That's it. I didn't like either Tower or Reclaimed and part of me wished I just murdered both parties because both groups had rules that severely hurt their lower community members. But this decision is in the second to last story mission in the game. After that you make a few final moral choices that have no real effect on the game going forward and while some of them did get a reasonable response out of me it also felt a little too late.

Lastly we have the story of the game. To be honest the plot is... fine. Yes, there are hardly any side missions in the game and no karma system to the game, but I thought the plot and the goal of the player/ The Tourist was good enough. I learned to care for some of the characters in the game and one of the final moments in the game made me curse myself in what I believed I had to do. But I also felt like that one guy who was just thrown into something they don't understand or really care about. Maybe it's because I had no morality choices that mattered and I either responded with friendly or hostile when talking with people and very little in between. But I think for non-fans of The Walking Dead they won't mind this very much.

But there is also a big problem with the storytelling of the game. One of the big rules of storytelling is to "Show, not tell." If there was an epic battle going on in a game, book, movie, etc and we had an option to either see the battle for ourselves or let somebody explain it all to us, which would you find more exciting? Probably experiencing the battle for ourselves. Sadly Saints and Sinners does a lot more telling than showing. I kept being told what things were like in the Tower and with the Reclaimed, but never got to experience or get into the societies of either group or folks of New Orleans who didn't want to be with either faction. I was hoping to be given chances to enter the main bases of the Tower and/ or The Reclaimed as they try to convince me their side is right, as well as getting to talk with their inhabitants in depth about what it's like living with them.

By only being told by third parties and posters what either side is like we lose the ability to really understand what we're fighting for. I quickly realized that since these factions were fighting over one so much that I needed to step up and start making progress to bring change to the region by finding the Reserve and helping struggling survivors out. But having so little information to side with either factions is disappointing and, as stated before, doesn't give much to the Tourist as a character.

To end this article I want to talk about the other game mode that's currently available: The Trails. Basically it's how long you can survive waves of walkers and the longer you go the higher the score you get. You can only obtain weapons through "Bite Coins," which are earned from killing walkers. I haven't played with it too much, but it's definitely a challenging mode. The walkers that go after you are nuts at times and since you can only obtain weapons, health, and food from Bite Coins you got to be more careful with how to fight off the dead. This mode is only for the people who are familiar with and really know how to fight in the game. No easy mode in The Trials.

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners has some really damn good VR game mechanics and is worth buying just for that. Its story though could have been improved with more complex story mechanics, more side missions, a better choice system, and more ways for the player to get to personally know people more. In technical and gameplay aspects this game is a masterpiece, but barely acceptable in terms of storytelling. There is an upcoming game mode called "Aftershocks," which I theorize is either a new game plus mode or additional missions for after the main story

Tentative Score: 7.5/10

To end this article I want to show a little bit of gameplay. I'm not one to be childish with my work, but... I want to this time:

Don't say you wouldn't try this yourselves. You know you would if you could get away with it!