Fast & Simple Download: WORLD WAR Z

There's nothing I love more than rifling through a corpse's pockets. Shooting and looting is so common in videogames that I've spent many hours of my finite life checking over dead guys for ammo, cash, or sometimes a sparkly gem or magic potion. The thrill of discovery combined with the rush of grave-robbing? It's the best.

Searching corpses in World War Z, a zombie shooter based on that one Brad Pitt movie from 2013, is never fun. Instead, it's a recurring scavenger hunt where the key to a locked door is on the corpse of an employee or security guard. During one of these key hunts, my co-op teammates and I seek out the six Very Special Corpses who aren't up and running around, and then press E on their bodies. These hunts play out the same way every time: the last body I searched had the key. I did this routine at least once in each of World War Z's four campaign chapters.

I have many complaints about World War Z, a four-player co-op shooter similar to Valve's classic Left 4 Dead. This might be the pettiest, but it encapsulates a lot of what's wrong with the game: its repetitive level design, thoughtless obstacles, and tendency to take any good idea and jump on it until it's dead.

Battle of Yonkers
It's weird to get a videogame based off a movie five years after the fact. Still, it's even weirder that World War Z takes inspiration from the 2013 movie when Max Brooks's best selling 2006 novel is just sitting right there, full of amazing stories of survival and human drama. The only nod to the book is the "Lobo," a special shovel-based melee weapon invented by Marines that becomes standard-issue in the rebuilt American Army. In World War Z, the Lobo is DLC for players who pre-ordered the special edition.

The movie adaptation stripped off everything special about the book—which I am in no way still bitter about five years later, ha ha, that would be ridiculous—to become a bland zombie movie overshadowed by other, better zombie movies. In the same way, World War Z is a bland zombie shooter overshadowed by other, better co-op shooters.

World War Z's campaign spans the world, following different sets of four characters trying to survive in the United States, Israel, Russia, and Japan. I liked getting to hop around the world to different campaigns. Switching things up between sparse desert and frozen Russian streets makes the story feel bigger and more universal. Unfortunately, I found that switching to new characters every few levels made the survivors forgettable. Hopping from a New York City fireman to a Russian Orthodox priest makes for an interesting cultural leap, but I couldn't tell you any of their names.

World War Z plays like Left 4 Dead or Vermintide or Overkill's Walking Dead. I joined three other players in walking, shooting, and scavenging for ammo and health. We opened gates and tried not to get pounced, poisoned, or snatched by powerful special enemies. Teamwork is key: even if I'm the best marksman in the world, I still need a friendly hand to pick me up when I'm injured.