17.6 hours played
Written 30 days ago
Arizona Sunshine 2 is an all around upgrade on the previous title. It looks A LOT better and more believable, has a more interactive world and guns with more proper handling, and is overall a much more polished and smoother experience.
The weapon arsenal handles well (besides the AK which will consistently be grabbed by the reload handle when you're trying to grip the foregrip), offers a reasonable variety of pistols, smgs, shotguns, rifles and lmgs, and supports more proper gesture reloads (though the simplified reload style from the previous game is still an option for those who prefer a more arcade experience). Melee weapons are a welcome addition, which are very strong and satisfying to use, but break quickly when slashing through all the Freddies. By default, the player character can carry 2 short weapons (pistols, smgs, sawn-off shotgun), a long weapon (rifle, LMG, shotgun, GL) and 2 miscellaneous items (grenades, healing items, keys, melee weapons) which lets you have a decently varied arsenal, while still being manageable with gesture controls and not needing a menu. The one criticism I'd have is that climbing can be a bit awkward, it's easy to accidentally grab your long gun/mask instead of the thing you're trying to grab on to or clip your head into terrain and get stuck with a black screen, at which point you need to let go and restart the climb (there are no consequences, letting go part way through just relocates you back to the ground you were on when you started climbing).
The campaign is a decent length experience at 7-8 hours. Despite boiling down to shooting rather unvaried zombies over and over, it never got stale thanks to good pacing, mixing up calmer exploration portions, setpieces and horde fights. It was a fun ride from beginning to end, mostly maintaining the light comedic tone of the first game, but being surprisingly well delivered on the few more serious parts. The game features a rudimentary crafting for explosives system to encourage exploration for materials, but at least on Survival you'll probably end up with more materials than you could possibly use up, as inventory slots for the different explosives you craft are limited. Speaking of which...
I could not of course omit the dog, Buddy, out of my review. Buddy can carry up to 2 short and 2-4 grenades for you. He will follow you around and attack enemies by himself once in a while, and can also be ordered to attack particular enemies, bring you items or go and wait in a specific spot. You can also pet Buddy, feed him and put funny hats on him. All in all Buddy is the perfect video game companion, cute and mechanically very useful, without the jank that can sometimes make companions insufferable.
The horde mode is basically the same as the previous game, with multiple maps remade from the original. They were fun back then, and are even better now with the increased mechanical polish. Run around, open up the map, grab new weapons and survive as long as you can.
Both horde mode and campaign mode can be played in singleplayer and coop. Overall Arizona Sunshine 2 is a very pleasant experience I'd recommend to any VR owner, especially if they have friends to play it with, offering good, polished gunplay and simple zombie killing fun.