Arizona Sunshine is a great game. And Arizona Sunshine is also a shoddy game.
Both of the above statements are true, but, depending on which virtual reality platform you’ve invested in, only one of them will apply to your experience. After making a barnstorming room scale debut on the HTC Vive, followed by a Touch-controller friendly Oculus Rift edition, the ambitious zombie apocalypse shoot-a-thon has made its way to the PlayStation VR headset. But, like the re-animated corpse of a loved one, the shambling shell of what made it special is all that remains.
Arizona Sunshine sends you out into the rocky orange desert of the so-called ‘Copper State’, on the hunt for fellow survivors of an undead epidemic. A colorful and surprisingly humorous take on the ‘Walking Dead’ nightmare, it’s a relatively straightforward first-person shooter, elevated by its virtual reality format
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Rather than just taking on the undead hordes with an analogue stick and shoulder trigger, you’re placed right in the heart of the action, flinching with fear as the brain-eating swarm edges towards your fleshy bits, twitching with every hint that the 3D audio offers that suggests a rotting walker may be awaiting around a corner.
Platform power
On the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, it’s a wonderfully tense experience. The former’s room-scale tracking allows you to examine the relatively detailed environments with a degree of naturalistic movement. You can peer into cupboards and draws to bolster your consistently-scarce ammo supplies, and whilst it still employs the teleportation movement that’s seen in other titles it still manages to make you feel like you’re walking inside a real world.
Meanwhile the Oculus Rift version really benefits from its superior touch controllers, which improves the sense of interaction with the digital objects littered around the rendered dusty settings.
Leveraging the power of a souped-up PC and higher-quality screen of the desktop-based VR platforms, the Vive and Rift versions of Arizona Sunshine look pretty good too – neither is going to bother Naughty Dog’s remastered The Last of Us in the graphics stakes, but give a good account of themselves with some stylised and bold zombie baddies, especially given the fact VR lays bare all aspects of a digital asset to the inquisitive player dead set on picking up every item and peeking at the underside of every desk.
Virtual discrepancies
The PlayStation VR version of Arizona Sunshine, by comparison, is a disappointment.
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Source: TechRadar