I appreciate this game, I don't love it, but I am really glad it exists. Everyone is comparing this game to Left 4 Dead due to how the game plays and feels, but I, having never played L4D, will not do that since well, I can't.
World War Z is an enjoyable and satisfying game when it comes to the gameplay and the main reason for that is its simplicity. You start a level and your mission is to go from A to B while fighting hundreds of zombies at the same time. Yup, hundreds! It is glorious and at times kinda funny to see this river of zombies coming towards you from all sides, jumping from the roofs of buildings or climbing on top of each other like they did in the movie just to reach you.
And as a typical third-person action game, you have a collection of guns, special guns, grenades and environmental traps to deal with them. Gunplay feels really good as all the weapons seem to pack a punch and well, tear the zombies to shreds. They will lose their limbs as you shoot or cut them with your machete, their heads will explode as you empty mags and their bodies will literally fly when you use any sort of explosives. Oh did I mention all this death looks glorious?
I found the game, and this may sound really weird, kinda zen. Since what you do is extremely simple, just point and shoot while playing in the lower difficulties, you don't need to think much of what you are doing. So you are kinda free to think about other stuff or you can just shut off your brain and relax by emptying clip after clip into these zombies swarms...
The campaign will take you to 4 different locations in the world, New York, Jerusalem, Moscow and Tokyo, with each location having like 2-3 missions to complete. I didn't learn much about the characters I was playing as, nor I did find an explanation about what, why and how this apocalypse came to be but at the end of the day that didn't really matter cause I did not care. I just wanted to shoot and blow up zombies, you know, keep things simple.
Now, you could also complicate things a little or a lot by raising the difficulty settings. The enemies deal more damage, friendly fire damage is increased, the game becomes well, tougher. And the special zombies like the Bull, Gasbag, Creeper become even more dangerous. That's why communication with your teammates is extremely important and beneficial for your survival.
Also having the right combination of classes helps a lot when tackling the higher difficulties. Classes offer different stats, different passive abilities, and bonuses and the more you play as a class the more stuff you unlock. The same things go for the weapons, the more you use a weapon the better it can become. And since there are a lot of classes and weapons to fully upgrade, World War Z will keep you busy for quite a while.
Apart from the Co-Op experience, there's also Competitive Multiplayer or PvPvE. There are a few cool game modes there, but I don't know as something felt off. Zombies go down immediately, but other players are hard to take down, while they kill you nearly instantly. It may be a balancing issue, I don't know, but the devs need to do something about it.
Until the competitive is balanced, you can play the cooperative part as much as you like, experimenting with the different classes, abilities and the many different weapons. While there may be not a lot to see, there's surely a lot to do and since all this doing is extremely pleasing, you should totally give World War Z a chance. Thanks for reading!
