The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners’ production values and atmosphere outweigh by far any videogame tropes and flaws that might weigh down the experience. This is a tough (and very scary) game, and every system in the game is built to support the idea that you are lone wolf in a very hostile world. Saints and Sinners understands its franchise, and is the scariest The Walking Dead has ever been.

It's rarely I can say this but for me The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners had dragged the VR platform forward. With its perfect VR implementation, its brilliant control scheme and its visceral combat, it a pure joy to play. A nasty, gruesome edge of the seat joy but a joy nonetheless. Brilliant.

It’s an experience so rich, rewarding, and interactively creative that it’s likely you’ll want to keep playing long after the last mission, just to lay waste to enemies using upgraded gear, or try out a previously ignored weapon. Most VR games don’t have legs like this, and it’s what pushes The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners into that vaunted category of must-buy PS VR titles.

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners would be a great game even if it wasn't in VR.

Despite some clunkiness of the control system, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a fun and challenging VR survival game that is also a case for not judging a book by its cover. Bored as I am with Robert Kirkman’s zombie series, there’s no reason to not add this to your PSVR collection.

It’s pretty unforgiving, in that restoring health can only ever be done via scarce consumables, and firearms and their ammo are also incredibly rare. Nonetheless, each mission is a tense delight. You’ll mostly walk to conserve stamina and avoid drawing attention, yet rasslin’ zombies is unavoidable, and you’ll want to be done before the town bells ring. Throw in humans both friendly and unfriendly – who will sometimes even fight among themselves – and you have a wonderfully oppressive, unpredictable world. And, yes, you get to slather yourself in guts. Yay! [Issue#176, p.78]

All in all, fans of the franchise and genre potentially have a real gem on their hands with The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners , but it requires a lot of work to get there. Right now, the game is still a diamond in the rough — with a bit of polish (or better yet, an Oculus and a powerful PC), there is a lot of fun to be found here. However, if you don’t like cripplingly difficult AI, buggy tracking and hours of picking up firewood, padlocks and shoes with holes in them, perhaps give this one a miss.