After the Fall – Review

Talking about After The Fall is a frustrating process. The game is a big step up from Vertigo Studios’ previous VR effort, Arizona Sunshine. Instead of being a solemn zombie survival simulator, this game is a lighthearted cooperative blast. It focuses on short, intense gunfights, with rising danger and a good mechanism for making weapons. Yet the underlying flaws, technological problems, and lack of social aspects bury all the positives.

After the Fall’s tutorial presented me with my first significant challenge. It’s the 1980s, but you’re awake in a bunker in a Los Angeles from another reality. The city has been engulfed by a freak blizzard, and ice zombies known as snowbreed are loose in the streets. Your job as a Runner is to go on short, above-ground excursions to gather supplies.

Furthermore, the game’s tutorial took me over twenty minutes to complete because it failed to adequately explain even the most basic of controls. Even worse, you can’t change how the buttons work. It took me a while to figure out that I could move, dump and swap weapons, sprint, and adjust the camera left and right. After The Fall’s weak opening is especially problematic given the importance of making a good first impression.

From here on out, though, things pick up a little. You are escorted to a social centre area after escaping an encounter with the snowbreed, which are basically knockoff white walkers. The arena is where players may take on tasks with others and improve their weapons. It’s cool that you can customise your weapons by taking them apart with a special tool and reassembling them with the parts you find in the game. Disappointingly, the experience of engaging with other players is not enhanced. The light gun arcade cabinet is used for both pairing players and choosing missions. You can still see other players running around the hub, generally in the form of crab walking monstrosities spitting in the face of a furious deity with their gnarled limbs and twisting heads, but your ability to engage with them is severely restricted.

After the Fall’s plot is essentially a wintery version of Left 4 Dead. You and up to two other survivors must make your way through a series of more fortified rooms, all the while fending off waves of zombies and searching for supplies in order to defeat the game’s final boss. There are unique zombies who materialise as brutes decked up in tactical military gear, enormous bloated monstrosities that burst when slain, and towering monstrous monstrosities with luminous weak points.

If you complete these tasks, you’ll get a reward. Both Harvest cash and floppy discs can be used to purchase new weapon attachments. You’ll be able to arm yourself more and more as you progress through the maps. Unhappily, these are just variations on the standard pistol, SMG, assault rifle, and shotgun.

Even if they don’t introduce any groundbreaking new ideas, these missions are good in and of themselves. To go to the next safe room, you’ll need to do things like search abandoned rooms for keys, defend yourself from waves of zombies while waiting for the road forward to open, and keep track of consumable supplies like pipe bombs and healing needles. Everything serves its purpose. If you don’t have a lot of time to spend in virtual reality, you’ll appreciate that each task can be completed in under twenty minutes.

After the Fall’s PvP multiplayer mode is the only other playable option, and it’s a poor addition to the game otherwise. The levels themselves have good variety, and the sightlines and weapon placements remind me of arena shooters from the middle of the 2000s, but the game lacks a sense of equilibrium. The greatest tactic in every game I’ve played has been to use two small-caliber machine guns and spray and hope for the best.

Thankfully, these two modes do represent a change for Vertigo Games. After the Fall is more of an action game than Arizona Sunshine was an attempt to make a realistic gun game with zombies. Ammo may be picked up by just walking over it, and the realistic reload system, which is notoriously picky, can be toggled for something quicker and more simpler. It’s a better fit for the style of game they’re attempting to create.

Unfortunately, After The Fall isn’t the VR equivalent of Valve’s celebrated zombie shooter because of numerous issues that combine to make the experience a frustrating trudge. The most noticeable change is visible. Your fellow players in the centre area are horrible-looking flesh puppets, and the rest of the game, from the maps to the set pieces, is graphically dull and uninteresting. After four hours of play, during which I cycled through dozens of maps, I couldn’t tell you what set any of them apart from the others. Another issue is that when there are more than a dozen zombies on screen, the animation quality suffers. Some of the fiercest bouts made me feel like I was up against discarded stop-motion puppets from a horror movie rather than ice zombies.

The biggest mistake After The Fall makes is also the simplest: they created a socially insufficient online game. After The Fall supports cross-play between PSVR and Oculus users, which is a big deal. This is helpful because the VR gaming community is quite small. The management of this internal online community, however, is a source of constant frustration.

My experience is the best illustration I have. Suddenly, I found myself in a match with three other players, all of whom were equipped with microphones. There was a snippet of this player’s online handle that was removed. The same player repeatedly insulted me, shoved his virtual gun in my face, and threatened to physically harm other gamers.

A textbook case of a Toxic Gamer, complete with homophobic comments and childish behaviour. For starters, I open up the “Social” section. You can’t fire him because of this. There is no way to report inappropriate behaviour. Upon completion of the objective, I returned to the central hub and discovered that you could prevent certain players from being placed in your team. However, there is no condensed list of recent opponents. The search feature requires you to enter an eight-digit player ID number, which is displayed in nearly illegible white font above the player’s name, rather than the player’s name. Not while they are playing the game or over their name, but rather on the Social menu while you are interacting with that individual.

Thus, to sum up, I had an awful time with a garbage player, and the few features that were present did nothing to correct his actions. Finding friends and putting together parties in the game is already a tedious and irritating process without this.

After The Fall can deliver some mindless zombie shooting spectacle if the player is willing to put up with some below-average social features, lacklustre aesthetics, and boring level design, and has a large group of really excellent pals on hand. However, VR requires a substantial financial commitment, and other co-op games in the same genre have advanced and improved to the point where they are superior options.