World War Z

Despite each location’s visual flourishes and incidental details, every mission involves the same prosaic treks from A to B

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When – okay, fine, if – the dead return to walk the earth, we as consumers of pop culture will only have ourselves to blame if we perish. The last decade-and-a-half of fixation on this specific end of days provides an encyclopaedic guide to survival, from hypotheses about what kills the dead (headshots, mostly, but also fire) to how to deal with the infighting among a group of survivors (headshots preferable). Like a training video for an imaginary disaster played on loop, zombie fiction has explored every eventuality and prepared us for the apocalypse.

All of which is to say, it’s an extremely well-trodden path along which Saber Interactive’s World War Z shambles. And although it carries a major cinematic IP, its developers seem much more interested in demonstrating their love for Valve’s Left 4 Dead games. It is, after all, a fourplayer co-op shooter, albeit played in thirdperson, which throws hordes and ‘specials’ at you while you navigate episodic scenes from after the global pandemic turns our familiar world into one of smashed glass, police barricades and viscera. The only real nods to the book and film of the same name are incidental – places, names, and that unnerving way its zombies pile up on each other to climb sheer walls. Conceptually, it’s Left 4 Dead 3. Stylistically and creatively, however, it’s closer to Left 4 Dead 2.1.