The War Z is the video game equivalent of a reanimated corpse. In this particular case it would appear that someone has beaten ArmA II's Day Z mod to death with a rusty pipe, only to bring it back to the realm of the living using some sort of vile voodoo. Now the game shambles along on unsure, decaying legs, clearly recognizable as the vibrant and unpredictable experience it once was, but irrevocably changed to something worse, something altogether sinister and disgusting.

That something, my friends, is Hammerpoint Interactive's The War Z. An MMO that's not really an MMO at all, the game's success thus far can largely be attributed to a series of lies told on the game's Steam store page. You see, while the game is clearly being marketed as a finished experience, what we have here is at best a half-finished game that comes complete with all of the placeholders, game-ruining bugs and omissions that you might expect from a game that's only around the halfway mark. This is the kind of stuff that developers show off behind closed doors at E3 as proof of concept. Only now, that proof of concept is the finished game. 

The War Z's Steam page boasts compatability for between 70 and 100 players on each server. After spending two solid days in the game, I have yet to see any server capable of holding any more than 50 players. That's not an MMO at all; that's a neutered game of Battlefield 3, minus the guns, vehicles, and coherent gameplay systems that make it, you know, a game. 

The developers also brag of their "huge persistent world." Yes, according to Hammerpoint, "The War Z is an open world game. Each world has huge areas between 100 to 400 square kilometers." Too bad that there's only one map in the game right now, and it spans about half that. Seriously, this confined world is so tiny it's practically impossible to go more than five minutes without being spotted by either a hoard of zombies, the sizes of which were clearly balanced for much larger maps, or a group of players systematically killing off all players they see to lessen competition for resources.

But wait, there's more! The game's Steam page also brags "No Classes, No Levels, No Caps: Create your own survival campaign, gain experience points and spend it to learn dozen of available skills [sic]." Yeah, it's true that there aren't any classes or levels. Instead, there's just... nothing. No sense of progression for your character, no sense of personlization beyond choosing from a few shoddy-looking face and body presets, and no leveling whatsoever. There are no skills in the game to improve your character, and there's nothing in the game as of this writing to actually spend the experience points you earn on. It's like Bethesda putting out Skyrim without any of the levels or perks, and frankly it just doesn't make any sense from a gameplay standpoint.

And then there are the screenshots on the game's official website and even the Steam store page. They're clearly touched up when compared to what the actual game looks like, even when running on high settings. You may have noticed that this review is devoid of any screenshots; that's because all of the shots provided by Hammerpoint just aren't indicative of what this game looks like in motion, and to include them here would be to lie to you about how the game really looks. Visually speaking, The War Z is less Dead Island (a comparably-scaled but ultimately much better game) and more late-generation Xbox. 

So The War Z is a product sold primarily on omissions and lies. But is that really the game's fault? It's important to point out in any review of The War Z that the game is not what it seems, but ultimately I'm a firm believer that every game should be judged on its own merits, and not on the merits of its developers. Which makes the case of The War Z all the more tragic, as the game comes virtually without merit. 

To list everything that is broken, ill-conceived or otherwise awful about The War Z would be an undertaking of epic proportions and, ultimately, a waste of your time and mine. Instead, I'll focus on some of the bigger targets so we can all get off of this website at a reasonable time.

Spawn point allocation is perhaps simultaneously the most immediately noticeable and the most egregious offense that the game commits. Taking the size of the game's world, and the purported sizes of upcoming worlds, into consideration, there are far too few spawn points in the game. This means that you'll often see up to three or four players spawning in the same exact spot simultaneously. Since each other player in the map is a potential competitor for resources, spawning almost immediately turns into an all-out brawl. But because starting players are equipped with nothing more than a flashlight for a weapon, these fights boil down to people flailing around smacking each other with weak melee weapons until only one remains standing. It'd be a comedic sight, were you not just asked to pay 15 bucks for the thing.

A lack of spawn points also propogates spawn camping. Since there are so few areas from which to spawn, it becomes easy to predict where people will come from. This has, in my experience at least, led to a lot of people scouring the environments for firearms and taking up positions behind spawn points, killing players immediately when they pop into the world.

Oh, and did I mention that death in The War Z lasts for a real-world hour? Because it does. When your character dies in-game, you have to wait a real-world hour to respawn as that character. Your only other option is to enter the menu, manually quit out of the game, and start an entirely new character, of which you can have a maximum of five. Of course, the game doesn't see it fit to actually tell you any of these things, so you're left to figure out the bizarre respawning mechanics on your own. All you'll see when you die is a screen notifying you that you are, in fact, being eaten, overlaid atop the image of a hoard of zombies mauling your corpse. This is also typically accompanied by some severe audio and graphical glitching, because the game simply can't handle that much action occurring onscreen at once. There's no "respawn" button to click, no tutorial text telling you the only way out of this hellish, glitch-ridden freak show is to enter the game's freaking menus and manually quit out - nothing. 

Death in The War Z doesn't just come from zombies and humans, though. In fact, the environment itself is out to get you here. No, I'm not talking about Hunger or Thirst meters, although the game has those (don't worry, you'll almost never survive long enough to need to think about either Hunger or Thirst;) instead, I'm talking about gentle slopes. Yeah, like small hills. Those bastards. 

See, the falling damage in The War Z is tuned (and I use the word "tuned" loosely) such that the mere act of walking down a hill can damage you to the extent of killing you. Now just to be clear, your feet will never leave the ground in this scenario. You'll just start taking damage for walking down certain gentle, sloping hillsides. It's like the momentum has suddenly become too much for your frail legs to handle, and now the friction's burning away at your leg stumps. There's no way to tell when you'll take falling damage for just walking around, so it's best to just circumvent the whole thing and... well, and not play the game at all, really.

Your character has a less violent, though no less baffling reaction to water. You'll come upon many a river, lake and stream in The War Z, but you won't be able to cross even the most shallow of them. Either it's poor game design, or the most subtle storytelling ever leading to the eventual revelation you've been playing a vampire the whole time. I'm going to go with Door A. 

There are tons of other flaws with The War Z; the animations are wonky and oftentimes don't play properly, characters frequently glitch into the environment, players often spawn completely invisible, items glitch out and become invisible, zombie audio will begin to play when no zombies are nearby, characters will randomly begin spewing blood from their bodies, hits with melee weapons oftentimes won't register properly. The list goes on and on.

And even with all of these glaring, game-destroying bugs, even after charging 15 dollars for this train wreck of a video game, Hammerpoint has the audacity to litter their game with microtransactions fueld by real-world money. You can purchase starting weapons so that you'll be well-armed when the spawn melee ensues, thus immediately breaking whatever little balance the game had left. You can also purchase masks, accessories and the like, although these are for cosmetic use only. No matter what you purchase, it'll all be gone should you character die. Which, just to reiterate, usually happens within five minutes of spawning, and can happen seemingly at random just because you decided to walk down a small hill. 

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is good old-fashioned consumer exploitation. The features listed on The War Z's Steam page are largely absent in the final product, and what little the game does include is laughably broken. This fifteen dollar, microtransaction-fueled abortion of a video game tries its damndest to rip off Day Z, and clearly it's attracted a large number of that crowd already. But with none of the tact or brutal grace of the mod that so clearly inspired it, The War Z is destined to be remembered at best for its broken gameplay, and at worst for the flagrant lies that drove its marketing campaign.

Score: 0.5/10

[UPDATE: As of this time, it seems that The War Z has been pulled from Steam. Players have the option to receive a full refund for their purchase, or to continue playing the game as it is. At the moment, it seems like Hammerpoint Interactive plans on tweaking the game some more before re-releasing it. Should this happen, we'll play more and update the review. Until then, let this review stand as a reminder to why the game shouldn't have been on Steam in the first place.]