Arizona Sunshine 2 review: humour’s a weapon in this solid zombie FPS

We live in an ever-changing world, but some things never go out of fashion—like well-timed zingers, stories of zombie infestation, and the camaraderie shared between humans and doggos. This rootin-tootin sequel to one of VR’s oldest and most beloved zombie shoot-em-ups is chock-full of all three. Arizona Sunshine 2 arrived seven years after its predecessor (which was first released in 2016) so graphical improvements and a more polished aesthetic were a given. What did surprise me, very pleasantly so, was the elevated quality of Rob Yescombe’s writing, which pops and crackles more than the original.

Gameplay and narrative-wise Arizona Sunshine 2 is rather rote: a solid but unadventurous addition to the FPS canon. But the verbosity of the writing keeps it punchy and engaging, despite it unfolding, like its predecessor, in a lonely apocalyptic America. The key mechanism for survival for the sassy unnamed protagonist (voiced by Sky Soliel) isn’t guns—though we chew through plenty of them—but humour. He delivers snarky running commentary and fires off jokes, the creators (perhaps unintentionally) making a point that comedy can be a powerful tool to protect oneself from terrible reality—or at least to dull its sting.

We begin the game by waking up in a boarded-up caravan with a hangover. “I really tied one on last night,” we say, noting that the place “smells like hot burps.” We discover the keys to the door are in the fridge (“I guess that makes sense after 50 beers”) and, once we operate the lock, that door comes off its hinges and falls flat on the ground (“a fitting metaphor”). When we see our first zombie, staggering around on desert rocks, we greet it with “hey Fred”—a name our character assigns to all flesh-chewers. This lumps them together linguistically while personalizing them in a faux-chummy way. 

First-person voice-over of the kind in Arizona Sunshine 2 is always jarring in some respects: a reminder that while we inhabit and control our character’s body, we do not control their minds, every spoken word highlighting this disconnect. Most games deploy such voice-over as basic functions to progress the experience, for instance dropping hints (along the lines of “hmmm, I need a key, maybe there’s one somewhere in the building”) and filling our end of a conversation. The constant talking and jiving in Arizona Sunshine 2 serves other purposes, showing off the wittiness of the writing and setting the tone and personality of the experience.

It also helps combat a sense of loneliness that might’ve resulted from navigating a world devoid of other people. But not devoid of other characters. The game’s best new addition to the predecessor’s formula is a dog named Buddy, who accompanies us through most of the experience. He has practical purposes i.e. coming to our defense, attacking on command, and fetching things from inaccessible places.

When it comes to the zombies, they also, weirdly, engender a sense of community. You won’t want to sit down with a Fred for a cuppa, sure, but they help make this world feel busy and lived-in, while avoiding the problems human NPCs pose to game developers—i.e. how we interact with them and vice versa. There’s also, dare I say it, something poignant about zombies: we know they’re humans gone afoul; people who once were and are no more.

Not that you’ll be waxing philosophical when you’re surrounded by ‘em. Like the original Arizona Sunshine, the gunplay mechanics are pretty intuitive and not too fidgety, accommodating zombie-killing mayhem. The game regularly dishes out new weapons, and they’re always welcome, enlivening proceedings and providing a reminder that a cracking pace in VR is a combination of many things, not necessarily connected to storytelling principles. Nothing about Arizona Sunshine 2 suggests innovation, or even attempted innovation: it wants to be a rock solid zombie FPS, and succeeds by that criteria. It’s the equivalent of a genre film that doesn’t want to mess with formula or take big risks—but it’s well made and rigorously executed.