The original Saints & Sinners game was one of the most impactful VR releases back in 2020 and stands as a true classic now, at least in my book. Unfortunately, the sequel does not take it to the new level neither for VR gaming as a whole nor for the series itself.

In fact, despite being sold as a separate game, technically Retribution is more like a DLC or an expansion pack. In essence, it is the same game with a different campaign + 3 new locations, a night mode and some new weapons and enemies. You can even import your save game from the original and get all of your inventory and materials.

At the same time Retribution is pretty buggy: it is eight months after the release now, and - minor nuisances aside - there still are major blocker bugs in the game. I had to replay one of the final (and longer) missions because the closing dialog failed to start during the first run. This is, of course, frustrating. Also, the AI of the human enemies is almost non-existent at times. You can headshot the tower soldier and his buddy, who stands right next to him, just does not react at all. More like a shooting range than an action game, if you ask me.

Despite all that, I am still giving Retribution a positive review. Thing is, if you loved the original, you are very likely to enjoy this one too. For starters, the core gameplay is still there and dispatching hordes of walkers still feels immensely satisfying and almost visceral, especially with some of the new weapons (sap gloves are my favorite but all the others are very good too). The new locations are done in much more detail than the original ones. They just feel bigger and much funnier to explore. The design of the missions is better than in the original game, largely due to the introduction of the night mode with the proper stealth component. And finally, it's a full-fledged game that took me 20 hours to complete the main story (could have been less if not for the bugs).

Personally, I have enjoyed my experience with Retribution. It might not be better than the original, but it still delivers the proper Saints & Sinners gameplay in large quantities.

Honestly, I'm loving it.I was really scared when I saw the first negative reviews flood in and I questioned my choice of purchasing the game immediately on release. True, when I launched it for the first time, it stuttered so hard I had to stop playing after five minutes.I wondered if perhaps I should refund the game. I'm a big big fan of the first one, and I was scared this one would be a letdown. Turns out, when you only play for ten minutes, you can't give a serious and well thought-out review (just like most of the ones I'm seeing here, being overly critical and disrespectful of the devs' work).So I took the time to play it again. I tweaked the settings, and simply changing the shadow quality to Medium and keeping the rest on Ultra made a big difference. I can play just like I played the first one now.Moving on to the actual game, of course, some bugs remain (some of them are actually hilarious, like doors doing a 360 through the wall). However, I know what Skydance Interactive can do, and they will not let us down. They patch stuff, they listen to bug reports, and they actually care about their product and their audience. Saying they don't is just blatantly disrespectful for their hard work to bring one of the only good, full-fledged VR games to our headsets.The story so far has kept me interested. The addition of new characters make the world feel livelier and gives the quests a better sense of purpose than the ones in the first chapter (which were already really good), and I really feel like I'm the Tourist. So far so good.I love the fact that it's an expansion of the first game. The new home base is crazy good, the new maps are a fine addition to the initial ones, and the story just evolves and doesn't keep up that old "good vs bad" cliché.Keeping my first save also feels kind of nostalgic since I haven't played in a while. I loved being able to move all my junk from the bus to my (now) neat storage shelves. I feel like I'm gonna have fun just organizing stuff and making a whole armory.Overall, despite the bugs and whatever people may say, keep in mind there's hardworking people behind this who are working to make it a more polished experience. I love this game, it's not perfect (might be soon), but it's a great sequel to an already great first chapter.

This game feels questified.

The interactions have been reduced tenfold
Draws won't open, barely any items you can grab lying around, the items that are there are Static
When you grab a Knife, Journal, Torch, backpack, etc, it screws up 90% of the time, the 10% is when I'm actually paying attention.
Also applies to shoving into your backpack, holsters, so on so forth.
The AI is garbage, I literally shotgun blasted a chick in the face and somehow no one else heard me, no zombies came around.
I was walking around, no crouching, no anything, making lotta sound, and no one heard me despite being a room over.
The zombies AI feels worse, they barely react.
The Human AI I'm not sure about, but what I did notice is, the Audio for them is Mono, not Spatial
I can't hear what direction a Zombie or Human is coming from, it sounds like they're just in front.
The pop in is atrocious. I was literally standing in front of an NPC, as far as I could go front, and just me, my body naturally swaying, activated the LOD on the model. The LOD is horrible.

I can't believe that this game did a crossover with Resident Evil! I wasn't expecting invisible zombies!
10/10

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners - Chapter 2: Retribution is well as its name suggests, is a direct sequel to Chapter 1 of Saints & Sinners. It picks up where you left off and continues the story while expanding upon the game in various ways.

Pros:
- Direct continuation of the story that is not bad
- Dialogue system with choices are still apparent
- The vibe of The Walking Dead is still there
- The ability to import a save file from Chapter 1, meaning you get to keep all your items, resources and recipes from Chapter 1
- Being able to scavenge both during the day and during the night
- New maps that are fun to explore and look visually pleasing
- New weapons, upgrades, attachements and so on.
- Combat is still as great as it was
- The character of Gerik was really damn good, he had great voice acting and was a menace.
- Steam Achievements

Neutral:
- The voice acting is sometimes really great, when at other times quite meh
- The game lets you go out scavenging during the night, however if you are doing exile orders for example and want to sleep until nights, you'd had to sleep twice every single time you go back to your resting place. An option to sleep until night would have been a tremendous QoL feature
- NPCs repeat the same voice lines over and over in the span of 5 minutes
- Human enemies still drop broken weapons 90% of the time
- The chainsaw was a letdown, though not that horrible

Cons:
- Launching the game in SteamVR causes the game to not recognize the correct VR inputs, I played on Quest 2 and the easiest workaround was to not launch the game within SteamVR but to use either Quest Link/Air Link. (Steam Link unfortunately forces SteamVR to launch)
- Had many bugs during my playthrough
- Exile Orders are a hassle to complete, essentially fetch quests that are only available during the night and you have to put all the items in the lockers during one scavenge run otherwise its progress resets
- Weapon durabilities are still quite low
- The Checkpoint system is extremely flawed, especially towards the end
- NPCs are as dumb as a rock with the peripheral vision of a fish

8/10 Even though the game expanded upon the game in quite many ways it also felt like two steps back and one step forward. However, I still find the game really enjoyable and hopefully we may get a Chapter 3 as well in the future.

My The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Chapter 1 Review

Huge regression for the game, this "sequel" has clearly compromised the product for Facebook's VR hardware.
Looks FAR worse in many ways (the blood in particular is laughably simple compared to the previous game) and yet runs terribly. Even on the lowest settings this runs far worse than Chapter 1 - perhaps an earlier iteration of the engine was used for this game's home hardware (Quest), or maybe it's CPU usage is more reliant on a single core. Regardless, refunded. Huge shame, loved the first game.
I fear VR's having a hard time thanks to Facebook and Sony splitting up libraries for exclusivity deals - and instead of making PVCR games then scaling them down for consoles, we're instead getting garbage like this.

I'm many hours into the game, and one of the main missions is bugged making it impossible to progress. I researched the issue and there are posts from 5 months ago from other players running into the exact same bug. 5 months and the devs haven't addressed game breaking bugs. Don't waste your $40.

I recommend this game only under certain circumstances. As a full priced game, it isn't really worth it. The game is more suited as a DLC. As a DLC it would be fantastic but it's a full priced game. I'd suggest getting this when it's on sale then it's worth it.

The reason I say this is because despite being a separate game, it doesn't really change enough to justify being called a separate game.

Same map, 3 extra locations, only 1 of them is actually interesting that being the tower. You got a whole bunch of new weapons which is nice and of course a new story.

Main issue with the story is that your decisions from the first game? Yeah forget about it, they don't matter. I'd say the only good part of the story in this game is the Axeman and the Tower conclusion those moments were fantastic.

The ending of the game was pretty interesting, left with another moral choice but it creates a pretty solid conclusion to the story.

I can't really see where they can expand from here however. I don't think it's a bad game, it just feels like an incredible DLC but a disappointing full priced game. No hate against the developers. I would love to see more projects from them in the future, although with the way the story ends in this game I don't really think they can expand on this project further.

Some additional points:

For whatever reason when you make your way back to the reserve via the church you experience the most god awful lag spike I've ever experienced in a VR game. It's horrific and it lasts for quite a bit, however. This is the only occasion in which it happens and if you take the shortcut to the reserve it doesn't happen.


Zombie spawning mechanics are god awful. You will kill some zombies, walk forward, turn around and zombies will be there. It really takes you out of the whole killing zombie things, I know the world can't be devoid of zombies but at least make them spawn naturally and not right behind you.

Not a negative point, actually a good one. This game is quite a bit harder than the first. Not only for battles but for resources. I found myself struggling with resources and battles despite having gathered an huge amount in the first game. It's quite a challenge but that's part of the fun.

So to sum it all up, as a full priced game, not worth, at a discount it makes for one fantastic DLC.

Quick Review:
Have you played the first game?
Go play the first game [again].

I pre-ordered this game back in March 2023 and it was so broken and buggy I thought “ok lets give them time to fix it”, that was almost a year ago and I don’t know what they’ve been doing.

I have just completed it and outside of some of the things carried over from the first game, it is without a doubt one of the worst VR games I have played.

Gone are many of the things that made the first game great, the tension of walking around trying to loot surrounded by zombies, replaced by infinite spawning zombies (some spawn right on top of you). Forced firefights against also infinitely spawning troops when you have limited resources and weapons that break.

At first I enjoyed the night missions (carried over from the fantastic free DLC of the first game), but its just so buggy that many times as soon as you load into a map, all of the zombies on the map will just run at you, and at other times you will be able to sneak around without them noticing you at all.

There are so many bugs and problems, invisible objects that cast shadows, weird shadows that won’t go away, missing textures, whole areas of the map not spawning, are just a few of the worse ones.

Try to aim a rifle when it’s jerking all over the place when you are fully still, no wonder they added laser sights! Chainsaws… A weapon that spawns zombies all around you! The grenade launcher is very hard to aim and due to the smoke trails you cant even see where you hit, at times I fired it and nothing happened. I once had a uzi bug out and go tiny so it fit inside the palm of my hand, I could still fire it but had no way to aim.

I swear all of the other interactions are way worse too, like accidentally pulling the backpack through my body when I was going for my waist item, pulling out whatever item when trying to loot or climb, the latter sometimes resulting in death or severe damage, not being able to interact with things. I wish they had options for the active area size and position of the item interactions as they seem so buggy now.

Many missions are very badly made, buggy and often poorly described and implemented, “go and do a thing at a place”, googling is the last thing you want to be doing when you are trying to immerse yourself in VR. Item spawns also seem bugged out and common items will not spawn in the normal places anymore, if at all.

The story is barely anything, just some minor disputes and then one big battle that ends in a let-down, there is one awful boss battle that is a crafting battle, yep you craft to defeat a boss.

I have no idea what they were thinking, other than cashing in on one of the best VR games ever made. It would be meme worthy but its so bad nobody is even writing game guides for it, literally throw away trash.

What happened, Rick? I thought you weren't the good guy anymore. Ain't that what you said?! Even right here, right now, you ain't gonna fight for 'em? I'm a better father than you, Rick. I'm better for Lori than you, man! It's 'cause I'm a better man than you, Rick. 'Cause I can be here and I'll fight for it. But you come back here and you just DESTROY EVERYTHING! You got a broken woman. You got a weak boy. You aint got the first clue how to fix it