today we're checking out the remake of Arizona Sunshine. The original game is actually something that I tried out last year before the remake came out, and I lost interest pretty fast due to the old mechanics. I just couldn't get into it. Well fast forward to now, I've finished the remake and it's time to give my thoughts on it. So let's dive in.

The original Arizona Sunshine came out on December of 2016. Almost 9 years ago! But last year they've released a nice remake of the game that matches the quality and graphics of the sequel. This remake is available on Meta Quest, Steam, and PSVR2 and the developers are the well known Vertigo Games, who also made After The Fall, and the recent Metro Awakening title.

Gameplay

So the game is the an easy formula to follow for what you can expect of a Zombie adventure game. You travel into multiple environments while killing zombies and solve light puzzles to progress, and also learning bits of the story at the same time.

The real fun out of this is the survival aspect. You don't typically have a lot of ammo throughout your playthrough. So you have to scavenge around during every opportunity to find more bullets, and you have to use them wisely.

In case you want to keep your ammo as much as you can, there are a few other ways to kill the zombies. You can sometimes find a melee weapon like a small shovel, a machete and a crowbar. Or if you're really lucky, you'll find grenades, or other explosive devises. If you find a red canister, make sure to keep it with you until you find some zombies, since you can shoot it and that will do a lot of damage.

The weapon variety is not as expanded as the sequel, but it's still nice. You'll get a variety of pistols, sub machine guns, assault rifles, and shotguns. All distributed along 3 types of ammo that you have to manage. They all work very well and are all useful depending on the situation. But I definitely miss the flamethrower from the sequel haha. That was a nice and useful weapon.

When I played the original game, I didn't thought much on the amount of effort that was put for the game, but after finishing it, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at the whole presentation. You'll be travelling to a nice variety of environments. When you're outside, you'll be seeing a lot of desert-like destinations that could totally be part of the real Arizona. And then you'll be travelling in some caves, a checkpoint section, a trailer park, and other places like that. The variety that you see changes in a nice pacing, and it never really gets old.

Co-op

Once again, the game has co-op and I want to say a big thanks to Alisson for going through the whole game with me! He's been of great help, and he's always down to play with me. It's been an amazing time and I feel like if you have someone to play with, I would definitely recommend that you do so. It just makes it a lot more fun to figure things out together and plan out some strategies and such.

The characters are once again pretty silly. I really don't understand why they went with the bandit look. I just don't feel like it fits with the character that you play as. What's nice though is that Alisson was able to find a bike helmet early in the game, and I liked that because it felt more like him since he's a big bike fan. So that was cool.

Another silly thing that I'd like them to adjust in the next game if they have one is the climbing animation. It was the same thing in the sequel. It just looks so silly. It just kind of breaks the immersion that you get in.

I just want to add that the co-op was excellent! It works really well and we barely had any issues. But there were a few issues. There were some times where the game would take a long time to pair us together, or even sometimes the game would crash when we tried to load up together. The person not hosting would also sometimes get hit by zombies while they were keeping their distance, and little things like that. Nothing too frustrating to be honest.

Story

The story is kind of very similar to the sequel. You're just a guy, who's surviving all alone. But then all of sudden, you end up hearing people out of a radio station.

Desperate to find other survivors, you decide to get out in hope to find them. Most of your adventure is basically to make it to those survivors. There's actually not much else to it than that to be honest.

This is a Vertigo game, so you'll be hearing your character talking about anything and everything of course, but there's not a lot of lore to it. And that's ok! The story doesn't need to be the main focus. I still enjoyed it with some nice little surprises later on. I do feel that Arizona Sunshine 2 handled the story a little bit better and had some better moments in it though.

To be honest, I don't think that people play this game for the story haha, it's the gameplay that's important, and this one definitely have some fun gameplay.

Difficulties/DLCs

There are a few difficulties in the game that you can pick. We took the hardest of course, Apocalypse. It was a nice balance, and the difficulty felt pretty fair. We did get some section where we struggled and raged a little. Sometimes they'll just throw us a big raid of zombies, and it's simply just not easy to manage killing them while trying to reload your weapon and such. But that's just the nature of the game. You panic and just choke on some parts. We died, we learn our mistakes, and we kept getting better and better.

The parts where there were just a few zombies wasn't too bad, but we still felt nervous from time to time. It's just not always easy to manage those enemies. Especially in VR, and it's even more stressful when they surprise you out of nowhere. There was maybe a section or two where I turned around and had to spit out a little yell.

Ok so the nice thing about the remake is that if you buy it, the DLCs are also included in it. And the whole game with the DLCs took us around 8 hours to complete. Similar to the lenght of the sequel. I was pleasantly surprised by this because you don't typically see the first game of a series being as long as the other games. So I really feel like I got my moneys worth.

The DLCs bring some nice backstory to you main campaign. They act as situations that happened before the main events. The first one is The Damned. You and a group of people are tasked to power back on the damn. When you arrive, there's an accident, and you're the only one who survived. So you have to do this mission on your own. It's a nice lengthy DLC, and there's some nice scenery throughout your journey. The ending for both DLCs were also pretty interesting.

The Dead Man DLC is kind of on the short side, but still pretty good. Your job is to find a rocket and launch it to a Zombie infested location. Fiiinally the characters that you have in this one are not bandit looking guys. They are people from the army, and fits with your character. That was a nice touch. There's some cool variety here, like needing to survive for 1 minute before the elevator comes up. But there were a location or 2 that was reused from the main campaign. It was still nice going through it though.

Horde Mode

Well if you've finished the whole story and you want more, they have something called the horde mode where you can play as much as you want to try to beat highscores on the leaderboard, or just to have fun with friends. This mode contain 4 maps that you can pick before starting up.

The objective is basically to kill zombies wave after wave. After you've completed 5 of them, you get an intermission, and then you get to replenish your ammo and get access to a new weapon. It's a nice mode and can last for quite some time if you're decent. It's a good time waster, but you won't see me compete for the leaderboard, these scores are insane.