When Hammerpoint Interactive announced The War Z , I was excited to see what the studio could do with the formula DayZ established. They said it was in development prior to the explosion in popularity for DayZ, and in initial reveals with IGN laid out all the awesome sounding features it was going to have. My hope was when they did their initial, official release, we’d have some crossover between DayZ’s gameplay, with a much, much more polished experience.

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Instead, The War Z’s “Foundation Release” is littered with bugs and other technical issues. Gameplay wise it just isn’t all that fun at this point either, where the high spawn rate of weapons, as well as fear of hackers, makes the majority of player interaction in The War Z overly punishing and one-dimensional. The laundry list of currently missing features, such as skill points and missions, only make it more exasperating. Someday War Z could be good, but for now it’s just disappointing.After installing The War Z the first thing you need to do is create a survivor. If you’ve bought the base game you’ll have one character skin option, with the option to unlock more for absurdly high amounts of in-game experience or oh-so-convenient micro-transactions. You pick if you want to play on Normal (where you earn experience and can revive without any gear an hour after you die) or Hardcore (where you die permanently). However, since there’s really nothing worthwhile or cheap enough to spend the tiny increments of experience you earn after every zombie kill, it doesn’t really matter. Hardcore or Normal, your characters will die, and deleting them allows you to circumvent the respawn timer.Before you die you’ll spawn into a random location in The War Z’s Colorado map. Your first order of business is to find supplies, which only appear around points of interest like towns and farms. If you spawn out in the middle of nowhere you can expect an arduous and boring jog in a forest filled with nothing besides scrub and trees, only to reach a town and likely be shot the moment you break from cover. Assuming you survive those first few moments, there’s actually some fun to be had sneaking past zombies that patrol areas where supplies spawn. Zombies largely react to sound, and carefully weaving through a pack of them like some starving ninja creates tense moments.Then other players step in and put a bullet in your brain. Like DayZ, War Z’s appeal largely comes from trying to survive along other players. War Z has two major problems, though: paranoia about hackers and the large amount of firearms on the map. Alleged hackers have shot legitimate players so frequently that most everyone on every server has a “shoot first, don’t bother asking questions” mentality. This wouldn’t be a problem if all they had were melee weapons, but instead, tons of players are running around armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles.Hardly any session of War Z ever yielded player interactions that didn’t end in seconds with one of us dead. Guns are just too commonplace, while melee weapons are a bit too scarce. It should be the other way around, that way players would be encouraged to form loose alliances where they might kill one another over a gun, but they can’t simply off one another from half a mile away without ever speaking to one another.A lot of this could be alleviated by integrating some of the “coming soon” features of War Z, and implementing a better chat system. Friend lists don’t currently exist and there’s no way to chat with anyone outside of the Proximity and Global chat channels. There are also no name tags above characters' heads, so even when you try to chat and identify yourself as friendly people never know who the hell is speaking, and often shoot you just because they’re so paranoid and can’t identify who is actually a potential foe. There’s also no voice chat system, something that made interactions in the DayZ mod especially fun. Proximity voice chat inspires people to communicate and cooperate, and War Z desperately needs this.In an attempt to survive more than a few minutes I tried playing on unpopulated servers, but it’s then that you realize how little there is to do in War Z. At this point there are no vehicles you can fix, no interesting structures to explore (all the buildings are generally empty husks with signage that tells you what it’s supposed to be), and no good use for the safe zones. The safe zones in particular are disappointing, since prior to release they were touted as places you’d be able to create and give out quests, which could create vastly more exciting player interactions. For now they’re places you can make transactions between players, or access your global inventory, only to be shot the second you leave them by players just waiting to prey upon you.For all the features that are disabled or planned for the future, the micro-transaction-focused marketplace is up and running. You can’t buy guns, but you can buy melee weapons and ammo, giving you a distinct advantage over other new players. It’s not quite a pay-to-win scenario, though, since no amount of purchases makes you invincible. You can spend your hard-earned cash outfitting a character and then get killed and lose your items, all without any warning. It’s a tough world, but it doesn’t seem fair to not warn people how ephemeral their investment is.So you die a lot in War Z, which means you’ll either have to wait an hour for the respawn timer, play another one your five survivors or delete the deceased and start again. Ostensibly you shouldn’t delete them because survivors earn experience, but for now there’s nothing to spend it on besides absurdly overvalued character skins. The promised RPG skill system that was touted prior to launch hasn’t been enabled, meaning persistent characters don’t really matter.War Z’s severe lack of polish only makes it even harder to enjoy the few features currently implemented. It’s unsightly , and despite this performs poorly. Visual bugs such as zombies floating above the ground or animations breaking become so commonplace that it’s more surprising when they work. Spawn points aren’t properly balanced, sometimes dropping you right into the midst of zombies. You can kill yourself just by running down a sloped surface due to inexplicable and unpredictable damage. It crashes all the time. In short: it’s a technical disaster.