Arizona Sunshine is a Virtual Reality shooter where you’re trying to survive a zombie apocalypse any means necessary.
Story:
In Arizona Sunshine you’re put into the shoes of an unnamed protagonist, who while wandering the Arizona landscape finds a radio that is broadcasting a message to all survivors, giving our character hope of survival and he embarks on his journey.
His journey takes him through mines, canyons, trailer parks and other places in order to reach the radio broadcast. The story of the game is rather simple, but it works to give you motivation to keep going, the voice acting of the main character helping you to really feel his pain when the situation is looking grim and how happy he is when things go his way. But if you want a great story, you’re not going to find it here.
Graphics:
Arizona Sunshine is filled to the brim with detail, which makes exploring really fun. Even though the resolution is lowered on the VR headset the game still looks good. Every level which takes place in different environment has different detail. Most zombies have a unique design which is nice.
Also as a note the PS4 version looks far less appealing than the PC version, but I didn’t mind it that much.
Audio:
The audio design for the most part is decent, but there are some problems with it. With the surround sound system it’s hard to actually figure out where the zombies are coming from which becomes problematic on higher difficulties and gets you killed.
The voice acting for the main character is decent. His line delivery is great and you actually care for him throughout the entire game and you root for him to survive. The guns all sound awesome and also other sound effects like explosions are great and truly well designed.
Gameplay:
Arizona Sunshine is an FPS and it works fine most of the time. You find weapons like Uzis, shotguns, pistols and grenades and these are your main means of defending yourself against the zombies or as the game calls them ‘Freddies’. Your main means of movement is a teleportation mechanic. You use your move control, press X and choose where you want to teleport next. There’s also a traditional movement scheme, but if you suffer from motion sickness I’d suggest you sticking to teleportation mode.
Arizona Sunshine also includes a survival mode where you fight against hordes of zombies and see how long can you survive which is a fun time waster if you have nothing to do. Also included is a two handed weapon mode, but that requires a Playstation Aim Controller. I was unable to play this mode so I can’t comment on it.
The gunplay is a lot fun and blasting zombies with dual SMGs, feels absolutely amazing, but sadly this doesn’t work a lot of times, because the aiming feels a bit weird. Sometimes it’s incredibly hard to aim for a headshot and you just waste ammo and blast them in the body.
The game also has a ton of bugs, like your body glitching into things like scaffolding and doors, zombies clipping into vehicles and other things, which become problematic when you try to kill them.
Verdict:
It took me around 3 hours to finish the entire story mode and I wasted another hour playing the survival mode, apart from that there’s not much else in Arizona Sunshine to keep you playing. With the current price of 40 dollars I think that is way to steep for the amount of content you get, so I suggest waiting for a price drop, because I still think this game is a ton of fun and anyone who was a VR headset needs to own this game.
