Zombies Grenades Practice Reivew (HTC Vive)
For the purposes of transparency, this review was created using a code provided by the company or their respective PR company. The use of a review code does not affect my judgement of the game.
At the moment if you fell into a virtual reality ball pit you would most likely come out a zombie, due to the amount of zombie games that are on the platform. With this in mind the whole zombie thing is starting to become a bit stale. Zombie Grenades Practice has brought another entry in the zombie genre, but can it breathe some more life into the undead?
As you will most likely be able to tell from the title the team at ARVI have taken a slight different approach to their take on the genre with making it all about grenades. Gone are the variety of guns or melee weapons, but being perfectly honest it does bring a fresh feel to the gameplay in this instance. Instead of cycling through a number of weapons , you will be given certain types of grenades at the beginning of each level to take the zombies out with.
That is where the gameplay comes into the game, each level will contain a set amount of zombies to kill with the selection of grenades you are provided. Given this the gameplay comes down to your skill of throwing the grenades and also some puzzle solving, but mainly it’s the skill. The puzzle aspect comes into the play when they bring in objects like switches that can help you, timing that throw perfectly with timed force-fields or even as simple as selecting the correct grenades for the set jobs. Given the team have taken in the idea of adding some puzzle elements to the game, it really does make the game offer something else different in this genre.
However, for me the gameplay does come with one glaring issue, there is no urgency in what you are doing. This is due to you not being under any threat from the undead – you are always placed in an unreachable place. Then even when the game places non-playable characters that you have to save into the mix, the zombies are not even interested in these and won’t attack them. Meaning the only real danger to them and you in the game is your grenade throwing skills. This slows the game down and lot and gives you plenty of time to think about what you are doing – which can bring a bit of a stale feeling with it.
When it comes to the presentation that game doesn’t do a bad job, but it is not the best looking title on the VR platform. One thing it does well is each level is set-out differently and this will give you some fresh feeling when it comes to the visuals. Given you are throwing grenades it was a given that the explosions should sound beefy – but in the cases of some of the grenades they’re a bit lacklustre in giving you that explosion feeling.
One huge surprise for me was the games systems requirements given what it was offering. You are required to have Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 minimum when it comes to GPU in order to get the best out of the game. The only way to solve this if you don’t is dropping the graphics to low, and given that games in the ilk of Skyrim VR require less than this to run, it just reeks of optimisation issues – which will hopefully be patched later.
With the premise of the game it means that it can be played seated, standing or using room-scale, and is played using the tracked motion controllers. Not much is used on the controllers, you are going to use the touch pad to teleport and use your throwing hand to hold the grenade and the menu button on that control to flick the pin out of it – or the other controller to pull the pin out. Then just the throwing motion to release the grenade. Yes it all very simple but it’s all the game needed.
The game comes with 15 levels in total, and in each level you will be rated out of three stars. The way to score more stars is by eliminating the zombies with the least amount of grenades as possible and saving the NPC’s. Meaning there is many reasons to return if you want to score three stars in each of the 15 levels, because the later levels this becomes very difficult. Also within the levels there is a hidden tank to locate in your safe zone – so you can also spend sometime looking for these. Meaning even through it might be a short game if you just want to get through the levels, you can certainly prolong it trying to score three stars – even if that is just returning every now and then to do so.
Conclusion
Zombie Grenades Practice brings with it some ideas to freshen up this undead genre by removing the guns and adding some puzzle aspects. However, it does come with issues like the lack of danger to both you and the NPC’s from the zombies and optimisation issues. If you have a PC that meets the GTX 1070 requirement and you want something different in the undead genre, then take this into consideration, but if not give it a miss (unless this issue is resolved at a later date).
Also available on Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality
Developer: ARVI LLC
