Synopsis:
Join the Zombieland crew as you take on zombie hordes against the clock. Headshot combos slow down time, meaning the most precise shooter is the fastest. Challenge the leaderboards with skill, speed, and accuracy.
Publisher: XR Games, Sony Pictures Virtual Reality
Reviewed on: PS VR2
Developer: XR Games
In Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded, you play as a new friend of Tallahassee, Columbus, Wichita and Little Rock. Although Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone don’t voice their respective characters from the film Zombieland: Double Tap, Abigail Breslin does. Outside of the HUB area, where you’ll select a mission and mess with your loadout, the game has little to do with either Zombieland film. This may be disappointing for fans, but the game’s vibe is in line with the attitude of the movie, and thankfully, it’s a solid shooter.
Across twelve levels with increasing difficulty, you’ll race against the clock to beat shoot your way through zombie hoards as fast as possible, racking up the best combo and score you can. Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded follows your basic lightgun-inspired gameplay; you’ll move into a position by looking at a node in front of you — a motion that’s extra smooth using the PS VR2’s eye-tracking — and then take out all the zombies in front of you before moving to the next node. Each level takes only a couple of minutes, but the later ones are rather difficult and have me dying repeatedly.
It’s one thing to clear these levels, but Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded is all about the score-chasing, and to get a high score, you need to ‘Double Tap.’ Landing a headshot on an enemy or shooting a projective out of the air will initiate an adrenaline-filled slo-mo. You can double-tap each zombie in the head twice to continue the adrenaline while racking up a combo metre and a higher score. The simple zombie is easy to pop off, but some require more than two shots to the head, and there’s one type of zombie that’ll walk in front of your line-of-sight, which you’ll lose points, and break your combo if you kill. As Columbus explains, it’s just part of the rules.
Each level has four challenges to complete, which range from finding a secret to reaching a particular combo. Rewards can be skins for your guns, or toilet paper, which you earn from killing zombies in levels. As fans of Zombieland would know, TP is one of the most critical resources in the zombie apocalypse, and as such, you can trade it to Talahasssee to upgrade your guns. You’ll also unlock new perks to equip as the game progresses, which allow you to ignore items thrown by enemies with a hard hat, dual-wield two special weapon types and more.
There’s not much to Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded, but there’s more than enough content here to fulfil fans of lightgun-inspired shooters. Beating a level is one thing, but reaching S-ranks feels near-impossible, and there are even more difficult B-side levels to play through. Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded is also an easy game to play, and new owners of PS VR2 should pick it up if they want something non-gamer friends and family could play when they visit.
