World War Z starts on Tuesday. But don’t worry. It’s just a zombie video game. Saber Interactive and Focus Home Interactive are launching a game based on the popular Brad Pitt movie and the World War Z book by Matt Brooks.
World War Z starts on Tuesday. But don’t worry. It’s just a zombie video game. Saber Interactive and Focus Home Interactive are launching a game based on the popular Brad Pitt movie and the World War Z book by Matt Brooks.
The game debuts for $35 on the Windows PC on the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Pitt’s character isn’t in the game, but it does carry the license from the popular Paramount Pictures property, which featured swarms of terrifying and fast zombies. I got a look at the Jerusalem level of the game in a four-player co-op preview, and I also played the multiplayer version of the game in a four-on-four match.
The best thing about this game are the swarms of zombies that come at you in waves. Like the upcoming Days Gone, World War Z features hordes of more than 5,000 zombies that act as a kind of hive mind, building bridges with their bodies to scale walls and span gaps. Your job as the player will be to team up with other co-op players and mow down as many zombies as possible. If the zombies get at you for more than six seconds, you’re dead.
It’s one of the games that is trying to fill the gap left by Left 4 Dead, which Valve has largely abandoned. I played a lot of the sci-fi co-op shooter Earthfall last fall, but it failed to get many fans (rightly so, as it was quite buggy). That game taught me that developers have to hit some pretty high expectations, as co-op games aren’t easy to pull off.
“We’re an independent developer, right? We’re fairly large for an independent, with about 450 developers in our two primary core studios, but we still don’t have the budgets of an EA or an Activision to go out there and market a new title, a new brand, and bring awareness of something that doesn’t already have recognizable staying power,” said Saber Interactive CEO Matt Karch said in a recent interview with me. “From our perspective, grabbing a license, especially one that fits the game we wanted to create, was the perfect way to get that awareness without having to spend tens of millions of dollars to make our potential audience aware of the franchise.”
“The flip side, though, is there is the skepticism about licenses. And I agree that there’s probably also a skepticism about zombie games. But this is a different type of zombie game,” Karch added. “We’re huge fans of Left 4 Dead, and I think that comes across in some of our videos. We wanted to create an experience which mirrored that experience, or maybe the best way to put it — that was inspired by that. We didn’t see any more Left 4 Deads in the pipeline. We thought this was an opportunity to create an experience we loved that would kind of be an evolution of that.”
Karch said that the team (which has been making games like NBA Playgrounds 2K for 18 years) created what they call the Swarm Engine to render zombies on the move in huge numbers.
