Survios, the studio behind Creed: Rise to Glory (2018) and Raw Data (2017), today unveiled a new VR game based on AMC’s TV series The Walking Dead.
Called The Walking Dead Onslaught, the combat-based game promises to have you fighting alongside the characters from the series in the first-person, however in what Suvios calls an exclusive original story created in partnership with AMC.
The game is said to include detailed melee, ranged combat, player progression, and a full campaign mode.
Survios says in the game’s Steam listing that it will feature single player and online co-op multiplayer. The studio hasn’t confirmed exactly which platforms Onslaught is coming to, however the Steam page lists both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The game is slated to release sometime in Fall 2019.
I got a chance to go hands-on with an early prototype at GDC 2019, and although I was only allowed to walk around a test area with dummy characters, I did get a chance to go ham on all manner of stationary zombified corpses using a variety of weapons to see what the game’s combat might have in store.
The studio showed me a pretty gruesome dismemberment system that reacts to various melee weapons such as katanas, machetes, and improvised weapons like long bow staff-sized pipes. When it comes to dismemberment, you’ll also have to put some heft behind your slices to get a clean break, because Survios, at least at the time I tried it, were adamant about not being able to simply waggle your motion controller to down zombies entirely.
Some of the things I tried were stabbing a zombie in the neck, slicing the zombie’s stomach open, and completely chopping off limbs. While I wouldn’t call it 100 percent physics-based, it is certainly poised to get you up and moving, as you can grab zombies by the neck to stop them, push them away from you, and (of course) blow them halfway across the room with a shotgun blast.
I also got to play with a smorgasbord of ranged weapons, including cross bows, automatic rifles, shotguns, and various pistols—both semi-automatic and fully automatic.
While I haven’t delved deeper into the game, The Walking Dead Onslaught it poised to be a pretty violent game any way you slice it (pun intended), although I can imagine the studio might scale back on some of the blood should they decided to install the game in their fleet of VR arcades.
