Arizona Sunshine (PS4 VR)
By: Vertigo Games
ALTHOUGH it sounds like some hipster steakhouse, the only meat on show in the latest PlayStation VR effort is flying zombie innards as the undead rise from the sand in the American south-west to feast on your virtual brains.
The second title to support the Aim controller, Arizona Sunshine is the best VR game you’ve never heard of and its zombie-blasting shenanigans should help prevent the dust from settling on Sony’s pricey peripheral.
The plot, for what it’s worth, involves waking up in a grotty encampment before heading into the glare of the Arizona sunshine to hunt out survivors in a zombie apocalypse.
No Romero-esque ruminating on human nature here, just a zombie duck shoot among the cacti 'n' corpses, as players mow down waves of brain-famished blighters blistering spectacularly in the sun.
The solo campaign is stuffed with cheesy B-movie dialogue as our hero plugs the undead on mountain paths, train cars and in underground mines, all the while descending into madness.
Your foe can amble at a fair lick, keeping you on your toes, though there’s a beefy arsenal of pistols, SMGs, sniper rifles and the like to send them back to the dirt.
And, while ostensibly a case of killing everything that shuffles in a four-hour slice of zombie target practice, tactics do come into play.
Sniper rifles will thin out distant crowds while mounted Gatling guns can cut a streak through dense hordes.
The requisite multi-player offers co-operative gunplay for two or four-player horde mode and massacring mobs of the undead is even more satisfying with a few mates.
With three control options – Move, DualShock, and Aim – only the latter two are usable, with the Move wand’s lack of analogue sticks severely hobbling movement.
The Aim controller, however, really hawks the VR illusion, while the arsenal has been tweaked to offer a selection of suitably two-handed weapons.
Impressively similar to the Oculus Rift version released several months ago, Arizona Sunshine suffers a bit from rough textures and pop-in on the vanilla PS4, though not enough to detract from the gun-slinging.
On PS4 Pro, however, it really sings. In the end, VR games live or die by their ability to trick your monkey brain into believing you’re in the action, and on this front Arizona Sunshine wins spectacularly.
With its sun-kissed desert landscape making a nice change of pace from the usual zombie videogame haunts, Arizona Sunshine is a single-minded, briskly-paced splatterfest.
If you’ve already invested in the Aim controller, this twisted blaster is a no-brainer.
