Arizona Sunshine 2 Review – Sass, Crass, and a Blast

On the surface, Arizona Sunshine 2 is an absolute treat for the senses. It’s visceral, meaty, tense, and satisfying in all the right ways. Beneath the surface? Well, there isn’t much. This isn’t trying to be the thinking person’s virtual reality zombie shooter, after all.

Vertigo Games accomplishes a lot here, delivering an immersive, tactile power fantasy of being a zombie-slaying machine. The guns look, feel, and sound powerful, and swapping between them makes you feel like an action hero.

Unfortunately, it’s not all fun in the desert sun. Much like the first Arizona Sunshine, the nameless protagonist here makes himself and his quips very heard. Crude attitude only gets you so far, though I get that’s a matter of personal taste.

Most of the narrative won’t really land, but as an overall package, Arizona Sunshine 2 hits more than it misses. It activates your lizard brain and fight-or-flight senses in electrifying ways that it’s almost worth stomaching the groaners.

Bearing Virtual Arms 

Once you strap on the headset, you’ll enter a reactive, zombie-filled world that’s ready for you to cause chaos. It’s the little details that make Arizona Sunshine 2 impressive.

Most glass is breakable, either by your hands or weapons. You can literally smash out a window with the butt of your gun. Moveable objects like doors are also manipulable by your hands and weapons, as long as it’s not closed.

You can throw useless items like plates or beer bottles at enemies, and they’ll often recoil back and register the force. Will it kill them? Not really, but it’s just neat. 

There are melee weapons like cleavers, machetes, and ice picks in the story, but for the most part, I found them only useful in smaller situations. When your blade gets lodged into a zombie head, you have to yank it out. It contributes to the overall cool factor, but it’s also unwieldy when you’re surrounded. 

To me, reloading the weapons is a big highlight of the gunplay in Arizona Sunshine 2. Each one looks and sounds so satisfying; every click and movement feels right without being overly complicated. It adds a minigame to your average combat encounter.

It creates a sort of action economy that immerses you in the moment. Shooter fans know that swapping to another weapon is usually faster than reloading; Arizona Sunshine 2 makes you feel that in a virtually real way.

My personal favorite is the revolver. Once you unseat the chamber, you can tilt the gun up to release the spent bullets. After putting in new ones, you can jerk the gun sideways to reset the chamber. Is that a liability in a fight when you could use a gun with a magazine? Sure, but it feels super cool.

Lining up your shots, especially longer-range ones, requires some good accuracy while aiming down the sights, which the game simulates pretty well. I felt like a sharpshooter with rifles, but alternatively, running up with a messily aimed shotgun to the face never got old, either.

Across the 19 chapters, some levels will feel a little similar and blend together. There are only so many sewers and suburbs you can run through before it gets a little bland. But the exciting combat carries the experience, letting the set dressing comfortably fade into the background. 

Who Doesn’t Love Dogs? 

Unlike the last game, the nameless protagonist isn’t alone on this adventure. Arizona Sunshine 2 introduces Buddy, a canine companion who’s just as adorable as he is violent. 

You can outfit him with all sorts of hats you find in the world, and he’ll also carry two sidearms in addition to the two you can hold. And he can maul a zombie to death while wearing all that. What more could you want from an apocalypse pup? 

You can direct him to attack specific zombies, but Buddy’s AI is also pretty good at being autonomous. There have been plenty of times I was about to be cornered, but Buddy came to my rescue and tackled a zombie to the ground. 

It makes him really live up to the old “man’s best friend” idiom, and that’s only furthered by the fact that you can give him pets and shake his paw. Vertigo absolutely knew what they were doing by adding the pet factor. 

Drop the Attitude (Please) 

Buddy plays a starkly contrasting role to the most polarizing aspect of Arizona Sunshine 2: the protagonist himself. He’s a quippy, sardonic, cynical misanthrope whose only friend for the past however many years has been Freddy. 

Freddy is who he calls every zombie, as if they’re one kind of hive mind. He jokes around with Freddy, busting their balls as if they’re a couple of frat bros, but he also kills them over and over again. 

What makes it all worse is that he doesn’t ever stop gloating. Every couple of headshots comes with some boasting, like “Well, you didn’t need those brains, anyway,” or, “Sorry, didn't mean to make your head go POP!”

Most of the things he says aren’t all that funny, but you can tell by the way he talks that these are meant to be jokes. It’s as if the volume, timbre, and random enunciations are the joke, as if we’ll clap and laugh like children.

Arizona Sunshine 2’s sense of humor ranges from “lol so random” to “I’m 14 and this is deep,” with a couple dashes of “profound” potty jokes. 

Of course, humor is subjective, and what you find funny will be different from me. If that all works for you, I’m sure the game will be an overall more solid package. (If you instinctually wanted to turn that into a dick joke, you are the game’s target audience.) 

Where it arguably doesn’t work, however, is when the game attempts to have genuine, heartfelt human moments. There’s a scene where you can pick up a wad of cash, and the protagonist wistfully says to Buddy, “Don’t ever choose money over people. Alright? Don’t ever do that.” 

Where did this come from? Why is this hinting at some deep-seated trauma in a character that has no depth? I’m not arguing against multifaceted characters, but this moment comes and goes amid a sea of poop jokes. He’s delivering the lines, but he isn’t delivering the emotion. 

There’s a lot of tonal whiplash here, and when the story takes a serious turn. It tries to paint a picture of this tortured soul, desperate for connection. Frankly, it just doesn’t quite land when the protagonist constantly leaps at low-hanging fruit. 

Arizona Sunshine 2 Review | Final Thoughts 

There’s a lot I really like about Arizona Sunshine 2. Even now, I want to hop back into the horde mode and blast some zombie heads while dual-wielding some magnums. It’s pure, unadulterated fun with guns in VR, and it perfectly scratches that lizard-brain itch.

Unfortunately, if you have a low tolerance for crude humor, this might be a hard one to stomach. I found it tolerable at best; I think groaning was the most positive response I had to its humor. The rest was met with indifference and occasional eye rolls.

It does get in the way of the story they’re trying to tell here, but even then, the story isn’t all too great. It’s a B-movie plot that isn’t memorable, but the action will more than makeup for it.

I just wish the protagonist wasn’t as trigger-happy with his punchlines as he is with his guns.

Arizona Sunshine 2 was reviewed on PlayStation VR 2 with a code from the developer over roughly 9 hours of gameplay. All screenshots in this review were taken by the reviewer during gameplay.