City Z is a procedurally generated top-down shooter game, designed with native support for Virtual Reality. The concept of the game looks really unique among the many other VR games we've seen. They're just not many top-down shooters out there for VR.
I did a little search and found out that there is a game called Zombie Outbreak, which is also developed by Little Cloud Games and the posts on Facebook is from 2013. From what I can tell, that game was developed for Android, because it was available for download via Ouya store. Ouya is an Android microconsole (formerly BOXER8). So I assume they took that game concept and developed it with VR in mind, and that's how City Z was born. Anyways, let's move on.
The game follows a narrative where a virus has spread and already devasted humanity as we knew it. A few group of people remain that put themselves a mission to first survive but also free their districts from that deadly virus by eradicating those creatures from every city.
The game does seem to be inspired by the movie World War Z. The creatures in the game are.. well, zombies, as you probably imagined, and this means that if you get bit by one of them, you'll turn into a zombie yourself, so make sure to keep a distance from them.
The game is divided into a number of random missions, each mission is played in a different city and each one of these cities is randomly generated. So everything including houses, building, parks, forest, etc - all is randomly generated. Each of the missions also carries a random objective, which can be either to kill a boss, get rid of all the zombies in the city, resist to a zombie assault, carry a rescue and escort mission or attempting an antidote prototype on infected civilians. Even the weather, the time, and date - all are procedurally generated. That kind of reminds me the game No Man's Sky, where almost everything in the game is procedurally generated. This means that every time you play the game you'll get a completely different experience than the previous game, and it definitely adds a higher replay value to it.
City Z also features various type of weapons, a progressible character attributes (Stamina, Virus Resistance, Social skills, etc.) and the ability to socialize with other survivors. Once you build a relationship with them, you can then share weapons, ammunitions and antidotes and even form group with them.
The graphics are pretty nice. I especially like how it looks when you play at night when there is less visibility and you need to point your flashlight to different directions to get better visibility at what lies ahead. There is a red marker that points out the direction of your bullets, so it's easy to see where you are aiming at.
The game is planned for April 29th release. It is played with a controller, and according to the Steam page, the game requires either a gamepad or keyboard/mouse to play. City Z is compatible with both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headsets and designed for "Seated" play area.
The game will be first launched without a multiplayer mode, so you'll only get to play the campaign. But according to a post on April 12th on Steam, the developers are working hard to bring you a great online co-op mode, so I'll think it will worth the wait. I've played many top-down shooters on the PC and PS4, and I those games are really fun to play with friends, so I hope that the co-op feature will be added shortly after the game is released.
Seems like a very interesting top-down shooter, and I really want to get my hands on this game to see how it actually feels playing it on VR.