Alpha gameplay for The War Z

Here we have a portion of the War Z Alpha. This clip features a player trying to reunite with his pal (possibly scripted) while gathering supplies and taking out a few zombies.

So, lets talk about what we can see from the trailer. The environments do look pretty good and seem to be nice and open. Just from a few glances it also seemed like there were quite a few buildings that players could enter into and, possibly, find supplies. From the UI we can see a hunger/thirst meter, a figure of a person that I'm guessing represents your character's health, and an indicator at the top right to show how loud/visible the player is to zombies. The buttons at the bottom show that a player can have up to 6 items tied to a hotkey while all the rest must be accessed through the inventory.

The inventory screen also appears to be a lot simpler in design from Day Z and it's nice to know that picking up items just involves holding down a key for a few seconds. That being said, there is an issue I can see from this trailer: the zombies. They seem to be taken down way to easily for my liking; just 4 or 5 bullets sprayed into their gut and down they go. This wouldn't be too big of an issue if it wasn't for the face these aren't running zombies. No, the zombies in War Z are the typical shambling and groaning hordes of undeath which makes the design choice to have them be taken out so easily rather baffling.

Now, those who have played War Z will know that the players are, usually, a bigger concern than the zombies themselves, but that doesn't mean the zombies don't present any real threat. Granted, the player in the trailer was using an automatic weapon that had a silencer, but I'll keep my wariness until I know what the spawn rates for ammo and those types of guns are going to be. I'll still be keeping my eye on The War Z and keep hopeful that this can deliver the War Z experience without the god awful controls and UI.