The War Z renamed as Infestation: Survivor Stories - is still rubbish

Here's a news story that doubles up as a Public Service Announcement. If you stumble across a game called Infestation: Survivor Stories, don't be fooled - it's still the same The War Z that received a score of 30 when we reviewed it at the start of the year. And while it may have been rebranded in light of "trademark issues", we've heard no reports to suggest the underlying game has gotten any better since.

In a statement on the War Z Infestation forum, community manager Kewk writes , "This change has come about primarily as a result of some confusion and trademark issues with a similarly titled property."

Similarly titled property? While The War Z had been criticised for - among other things - being a DayZ clone with an all too similar name, it's more likely that the upcoming film adaptation World War Z prompted the change. Fun fact: a lot of zombie fiction has the letter Z in the name.

"While we were reluctant to rename the game so long after launch," Kewk continued, "especially with nearly 1 million registered players, it was ultimately decided to be in the best interest of our existing community as well as future players in order to eliminate confusion."

And so, in that same spirit of eliminating confusion, here's the TL;DR version: The War Z is now Infestation: Survivor Stories. Still don't buy it.

Phil Savage
Editor-in-Chief

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.

Latest in Gaming Industry
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'
A masked man with an axe in the woods
Rebellion CEO seems kind of awed by major studios making massive videogames: 'How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?'
A computer screen with program code warning of a detected malware script program. 3d illustration
Coder faces 10 years' jailtime for creating a 'kill switch' that screwed-up his employers' systems when he was laid off
Atomfall screenshot
Rebellion CEO puts the studio's recent avoidance of layoffs down to control of scope and cost: 'Sometimes we say, guys, this game's too big'
Judge Dredd promotional image in Warzone
Half-a-dozen 2000AD games were in the works before fizzling out: 'The games you get to see are a tiny representative of the number that get started—sadly'
sniper elite 5 cover
Sniper Elite CEO reckons Swen Vincke is right to snarl at short-sighted publishers: 'You could argue that their business at senior level isn't making games… their business is managing their shareholders' perceptions'
Latest in News
Mark Darrah
BioWare veteran says a big delay is better than lots of little ones, because sometimes you just gotta 'burn it down and take the other fork in the road'
Two rising ronin facing each other
Rise of the Ronin is another crappy PC port, performance patch coming 'soon'
Defiance players
A dead MMO that launched with a now-cancelled TV show in 2013 is coming back 4 years after servers were shut down
The OpenAI logo is being displayed on a smartphone with an AI brain visible in the background, in this photo illustration taken in Brussels, Belgium, on January 2, 2024. (Photo illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
OpenAI is working on a new AI model Sam Altman says is ‘good at creative writing’ but to me it reads like a 15-year-old's journal
Alma, the handler from Monster Hunter Wilds, closes her eyes and looks a little disappointed.
This impractical method of getting a 1-second capture time in Monster Hunter Wilds can make you the fastest hunter alive—on paper
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'