Haters are gonna hate, even without playing.
I came here expecting to see this game rated with 6, instead I noticed it has a 3, because a lot of people are rating it 1 and that can only happen after 2 things. 1st - the gamer was angry and didn't wait a day or 2 before reviewing with clear mind, when he would be actually able to rate it rationally and give it a 2~4. 2nd - Half of them didn't even play and decided to rate it anyway based on videos, pictures and other reviews.
This game is not a scam and i think people who are giving this title to their reviews should really look for the meaning of this word on the dictionary.
Now the review (a real one, can you believe this?)
I'll start with the graphics and visuals:
As a lot of people know, the company used an existing graphic engine that's well know for most of the steam gamer who download the free to play games. It's the same engine of War Inc. and uses most of the same animations, models, textures etc. I understand that lots of people would call it a rip, but it's not, most of the games use refurbished models. But my point is, it does not has bad graphics, it has okay ones, I personally like the weapons.
The whole ambient is well constructed but lacks a lot of many things, the main one is the small number of open buildings and houses that players can walk in and the second one is the lack of interior in the few open houses, and by that I mean furniture. It doesn't matter if it's a nuke appocalypse or a zombie one, no one carries their furniture away afraid of losing them, they just leave it behind. I can say that 90% of the houses and buildings I entered were empty.
I give 6/10 to the visual and graphics of this game
Audio:
I found this part of the game pretty poor and random. I understand that creepy strong sounds are used in the middle of the silence to rise the suspense, but this game made it become completely constant and random, which made me stop caring about them after 1 hour of game, but don't get me wrong, the sound was still creepy, I just knew that as scary as it was it didn't mean anything was going to happen.
The guns sound good, but not from distance. I understand that a gunfire would echo through an empty city and be heard in many points of it, but they put a small pistol sound at the same level as a shotgun, you can hear both from outside of a town if someone is shooting in it. But the part that disappointing me most was the bad 3D sound, people shoot and I have no idea how far they are, or from which direction the shot came from.
I give a 4/10 to the sound
Now the gameplay:
Different from other reviews I'm going to give a high rate to this one. I really enjoyed it. the whole intensity of the game, the fear from both zombies and players were well worked and deserve to be well spoken. But, every game has it's down sides, even at it's best areas. This one has terrible intuition one, the handgun/melee system. While switching between the main weapon and the secondary one is easy, doing the same between the second and a melee is extremely annoying. That happens because there is no third weapon slot, so if you want to use a melee weapon but you have a pistol equipped, you'll have to open the inventory, click and hold the melee weapon and drag it to the secondary weapon slot. Doing that during a combat is just terrible, It's easier to just run away for 10 mins to get rid of zombies. Another downside is the constant changes that the dev team make on the zombies which some times are for good and other for worse. Now the zombies are faster and their attack range is longer than before. So you can run 1 meter away from one of them and still get hit, but this is a minor problem, at least to me.
7.5/10 to gameplay.
Now I wanna talk about the "scam" thing and reinforce that some people really need to look for the meaning of this word on the dictionary. This game is not and never was a scam, it can be considered a direct rip off from DayZ but it's not a scam at all and most of the players who complain about the features never found in game forgot to tell they are new players that only got the game when it came out on steam because all the other players who pre-ordered or simply bought it after it came out knew they would improve the game with time and slowly give us what they promised and that happened because the devs were way too eager to launch the game that they didn't wait until the game was done to do so, but do you know why that happened? BECAUSE THEY ARE A INDIE COMPANY! YES, WARZ IS AN INDIE GAME! And the same happens to most of the online indie games made till now, including Minecraft, but don't get me wrong, i'm not defending them for what they did on steam, i'm just trying to show that lots of these reviews were generated by sided people that have pre-made opinions.
Oh well this was a big review! Sorry about my english, It's not my main language and I believe that this game can become something more with time and as it's dev team grows more mature!
Thanks for reading and feel good to disagree with me 1-rating-haters like all the other reviews that does not call this game a scam.
edit - 01/21/2013 - I had to add this to my review - Newest Gamespot's review video is hilarious because I remember really well when, before the game being released, they made a gameplay comparison with DayZ where they actually played the game and actually liked it, damn they seemed to love it. It's funny how now the new video only says bad things about it.