Requisition VR Singleplayer First Look and Review

First of all, a little disclaimer. The folks over at Arcadia gave me an early access key to Requisition VR before its Steam release on October 20th. Since there doesn’t seem to be anyone on the Multiplayer yet, I decided to get my feet wet and review the Singleplayer Campaign.

While Requisition VR bills itself as a Cooperatively focused experience, there is a Single player option with a light story, which at this time consists of two missions, though I’m sure more will be added. Still, I got a pretty thorough impression of the game as it stands right now.

For a video version of this review check it out on our Youtube channel.

Unique Crafting and Zombie Destruction

So what kind of experience is this game that we’re reviewing? Requisition VR has a very important and fundamental thing going for it, and that is a very interesting premise that utilizes and innovates with Virtual Reality.

Requisition VR is a Coop zombie survival game that not only gives you guns and melee weapons, but also the ability to combine them in countless ways and create some insane and deadly zombie crushing instruments. It also gives you the ability to create and set a very wide variety of traps that can be triggered with pressure plates, trip wires, buttons, a ton of things.

As for story it’s your standard zombie stuff, a fog appeared one day and people started turning into zombies and civilization rapidly splintered. You and your compatriots are from a small colony of survivors seeking a solution as the fog spreads ever further. While not the most original story, this is a zombie game, and so it doesn’t need one.

The Bugs

Now that we know what Requisition VR is about, let’s get the elephant out of the room first. This is a modern VR game, and like all modern games and VR games especially, it has bugs, and will release with bugs. Also like all modern games and especially VR games, those bugs will probably be fixed over time, so I won’t talk about them too much, but right now Requisition VR feels really janky and looks kind of ridiculous at times.

Zombies will climb over air, attack air. Hit registry is… weird. Stabbing especially feels odd, with the thing you’re stabbing with being awkward to pull out of the zombie, and therefore twisting your arms at weird angles. Overall the bugs as they stand right now are pretty immersion breaking, and I mention them only because some of them seem so ingrained in the basics of your arms interacting with the enemies and environment that they may take a very long time to fix, if they are fixed at all.

This is basically a long winded way of saying that Requisition VR does not feel smooth to play, and it is easy to lose your sense of immersion in the game. Most of these bugs can and likely will be fixed, but some, like when hitting zombies feels odd and sometimes jerks your arms out of place, may take a very long time to get right. Overall I doubt Requisition VR’s interactions will ever feel as smooth as something like The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners.

Mission 1: The Hut

Okay so the game is a little janky, but what is the gameplay like? Well if you’re looking for a desperate defensive mission against waves of zombies that will make you prepare as thoroughly as possible and use every ounce of cleverness you have, the first mission does not deliver that. If you love to smash some zombies and maybe bait them into an explosive trap or two, then that’s what you’ll get.

When you start you’re given a few objectives, mainly looking for a battery in a nearby house so you can open a shed. So you go into the house and get the battery, killing a few wandering zombies along the way, and even a great big fat one. All throughout the house are drawers and cabinets that you can loot. The loot inside them seems to be totally randomized. I’ve found toast and detergent in a drawer one round and then an assault rifle and beer cans on the next round.

A Digression: Finding Weapons

This can be a little annoying, because you need to get pretty lucky to get a gun and also a decent amount of ammunition for that gun. The only guaranteed spawns of items are those sitting outside of cabinets, and in both of these missions they are rarely items that go together, such as a gun and its ammunition. More importantly, they are hardly ever items that combine into unique weapons.

Unique weapons are made by certain items that are combined into an especially powerful weapons, they’re preprogrammed. So a metal baseball bat and a worklight creates an electrified spiked bat, or a leaf blower and a blowtorch create a flamethrower. These weapons are super powerful and super fun to use.

To get them, though, you’ll need to get really lucky and hope that the items to create them spawn in these random containers. Otherwise you might end up with three metal bats and no lights to make them really effective, just like you might end up with one of every firearm, but only one magazine of ammunition for a couple of them.

This is frustrating in Singleplayer, but I imagine Co-op would make this worse, with one person having managed to scrounge a gun, and another having found the ammo, but each one holding onto it and making both pieces useless. Or, one person finding a blowtorch and one finding a leafblower, but never combining the two together into a fantastic weapon.

So unless you get lucky and both know what junk you need to create a great weapon and also manage to find that junk, you’ll probably end up just duct taping random sharp or heavy items together to create insane weapons, which is really good fun too. Or you might just never bother with that and hack all your enemies apart with an axe. Still, there’s definitely some charm to be had in weed wacking a zombie to death, there are a lot of interesting weapons in Requisition VR.

Back to Mission 1: The Hut

Anyway back to the first mission. Hopefully you both played and payed really good attention to the tutorial, because otherwise you’ll be really lost here. I didn’t pay enough attention, so I had to go replay the tutorial a second time, turns out the tutorial room with the crafting tables was the most important, go figure. What you’re going to want to know is that every item has certain materials that it is made out of.

Some of these materials are needed for creating “trap boxes,” which allow you to set up traps, and explosives to be activated by those traps.

Also if you want to create barricades you’ll need to know that you can’t just use a wrench you found to break up furniture into scrap wood for boarding up windows. You also can’t use a literal hammer that you found. You need to use the permanent hammer that you can take out of the left side of your chest, otherwise furniture won’t break into wooden scraps that you can use for barricading, and you can’t hammer in nails. Only the special hammer in your chest will do either.

The first mission forces you to create two traps, and barricade three windows. Now, maybe there are more zombies in Multiplayer, but as far as the Singleplayer goes, I found these preparations to be not only unnecessary but unhelpful.

First of all the barricades. You can only barricade windows, so you’d think the best course of action would be to barricade the first floor of the big house to buy you some time to thin out the zombies before maybe retreating upstairs or outside if you get overwhelmed. Well it isn’t, because the doors won’t close. What is the point of barricading windows if the doors don’t close at all? I’m not sure if this is intended design or a bug, but you can’t even grab the door handles.

You need to open the doors to get into and out of the place, so the zombies will just march through the open doorway. If you’re leaving multiple open entryways to the house, what is the point of the barricading mechanic? I never once saw a zombie try to get in through the windows, they just walked through the empty doorway.

Not that I spent much time defending the house. The zombies are slower than you, so confining yourself to the small rooms of the house is actually a bad tactic, because you can get cornered there. What ended up being far more effective was just running around outside and smacking zombies as they got close.

As for the traps, they were effective for what they were, but they only really killed one or two zombies apiece and weren’t really worth the time it took to set them up. Despite the janky melee combat I was only really in danger once or twice. Running away and chugging a beer or bottle of wine was an easy to way to survive in those situations. The enemies couldn’t keep up, and I topped off my health pretty quickly.

After three waves the mission was over. All in all I got an impression not of a desperate defense while surrounded by walls and traps, relying on my cleverness and preparation to survive, but rather an action packed romp around a field, slapping zombies as they came at me without any regard for traps or defenses.

Not to say that it was an unenjoyable experience. The guns in particular were actually much more satisfying than VR guns usually are. Just that if you’re looking for a more defensive and planning oriented experience, you won’t find it here despite the game mechanics that seem to point to a game that is more oriented that way.

If the best and most fun way to fight zombies is to run around an open space and whack them, why patiently sit behind traps and barricades? It seems that there is a gap between the implementation and what was desired by the designers. As it stands gameplay was much more fun without bothering with barricades and traps, at least as far as the Singleplayer is concerned.

Mission 2: The Gas Station

Mission 2, unlike the first, did not start with the game forcing you to do useless things like set traps and build barricades. Instead it changed the pace of things a little, and asks you to gather some items for your bus to repair it. More fuel, some oil, new tires, new battery, the works basically.

So instead of a purely defensively focused mission, you’re encouraged to look around and loot while fighting the wandering zombies, cool. There’s also some great weapons to be found like the sledge hammer, which is great even without the part needed to make it more powerful. There are a few times though, such as when you fill the new tire with air, or charge the battery and install it in the bus, that the noise summons a big wave of zombies, so there’s still plenty of action.

Mostly this level is a scavenger hunt, but it is a great change of pace from the first level, and looking for the required parts was genuinely fun. This means that when more missions are added they will probably have similarly interesting variation between them. Maybe they will even get hard enough that setting a bunch of traps will actually be necessary for victory.

Conclusion

Requisition VR is not a very impressive game as it stands right now, at least as a Singleplayer experience. Like most games that feature a multiplayer option, Requisition VR is probably much better with some friends. It is meant to be a Cooperative experience after all. Still, I don’t believe that will fix the gap between the intention of the game designers with mechanics such as barricades and traps, and the end result of those barricades and traps being either useless, or more time than they are worth.

If you are are a real VR or zombie enthusiast then you will definitely enjoy taping random objects together to make crazy weapons to bash zombies with. Though that alone does not make up for Requisition VR’s downsides. As a Singleplayer experience, you can do better elsewhere, though as far as fighting zombies cooperatively in VR there aren’t many options, and if that is what you are looking for then Requisition VR might be worth a closer look. Regardless, as long as the folks at Arcadia keep fixing and refining this game, they could have a real unique gem on their hands.