Parents' Guide to The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

While not a perfect adventure, this is an intense, scary and quite graphic VR game that has a lot going for it. The first thing you'll notice in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is the smart use of motion controllers that really give you the sense that you're manipulating objects in this world. Many games let you do things like push open a door, grab a note pinned to a wall, or aim and fire a gun by performing the gestures with your hands in real life. But there are great touches with the little details in this game. For example, you must wrap a bandage around your forearm to prevent an infection. Or you can grab a defeated zombie's face and wave the corpse around like a ragdoll or scale a wall by shimmying across a gutter. The developers did a great job here creating that immersion. The only thing missing is physical crouching, which could likely be added in an update (it's silly you need to do that with a button press instead).

The action (with some role-playing game elements) is gratifying and very gory. Not only is it tense when you're surrounded by flesh-eating Walkers, and you realize you're running low on ammunition, but then it starts getting dark outside which amps up the tension even more. But the graphics are good, not extraordinary, and same goes for the enemy A.I. (artificial intelligence), which takes away some of the overall experience. The characters are interesting – at least, to start – which will hold your attention during non-combat sequences, and the moral choices you need to make create a sense of personalization to your adventure (such as who should be saved or left to die). But after a few hours into this campaign, you might get a sense of déjà vu when it comes to the environments, missions, and combat. If you like horror movies and own one of the VR headsets required to play this $39 game, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is an atmospheric, 15- to 20-hour game of survival, exploration and blood-drenched combat.